Simon Carr: The Kitchen Capitalist
Continents collide in a comedy of errors
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Your support makes all the difference.The story so far: the author has sold his house to finance a manufacturing project in the hope of making a small fortune to finance his old age...
China asked for the box back. I'm not calling it Prototype Two any more. It's "the box" until it decides to work. To be completely frank, it's called "the ******* box" until it decides to work. You can't let the bill of materials dominate you. Someone's got to be boss.
We were on the very point of going into production, if you remember, when the speaker conked out. Stephen Fry's large, complicated voice sounded like the dottle in the bottom of a smoker's pipe. So "******** box" went back to the other side of the world. The engineers said they were going to adjust the amplifier settings and remodel the internal package and whatever rubbish technical people say when they don't want to tell you what they're doing.
But because they were taking responsibility for the malfunctioning and were going to sort it all out, I was feeling quite buoyed, quite cheerful about the malfunction until Wales expressed "grave concern" at the proposal. If China adjusted the amplifier setting then the printed circuit board would have to be modified (don't ask me why): experience tells us this sort of change just doesn't work. Everything would all have to be tested on two continents, retested, fixed and refixed.
Wales and China, we now know, make equal and opposite mistakes; each mends the other's errors and puts in a new one to keep the process alive.
For instance: the rig (that is, the pre-prototype demonstrator) came back from Wales and the volume's too loud again. There is no reason for this. Despite western physics' history of explaining things, it is inexplicable. The engineering is the same. The settings haven't changed. The inputs are identical, the outputs ditto. Wales hovers on the margin of telling me I'm wrong, that it's all my fault. That would be dangerous. None of us would survive that.
I don't think chest scrabbling is the answer any more. I'm not quite sure what the answer is. Perhaps it's important just to bank the gains. We have gains. We have a ******* box. It works in principle and nearly works in practice. The factory in Japan has kept the slot open for printing the voice chips. We could take a gamble and go ahead with printing the chips? Would that be sensible? Considering that nothing has gone right first time since the beginning of this project nearly 18 months ago?
We wanted to hear everything working as it would in production before printing chips, didn't we? They're one-time only. They're not re-programmable. If they come out wrong. . . it's five months for stock to come in and a wheelbarrowload of £50 notes to pay for them.
But the factory's patience is wearing thin. We were booked in a month ago. We need to bank another gain, do we not? Is this worth the risk?
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