Simon Carr: The Kitchen Capitalist

Everything works - but not at the same time

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...

It's a long drive up to the hospital where lies my dear old dad. We couldn't be more different. He has always been severely risk-averse. For most of his career he was something he called with quiet pride "a public servant". You could, just from that, guess his age. He left school during the Depression, went through the war as a soldier, was picked off the street in Whitehall by an Army chum and inducted into the Foreign Office. The pension rights were the thing. When he was 30, his life was guided by his retirement. That made no sense to me as a young man. But by the time he was my age, he'd lived all over the world, paid off his mortgage and was looking at early retirement on half-pay, index-linked for the rest of his life. So who's the clever one?

For him, the idea of selling his house to give the money to a Chinese factory owner on the other side of the world . . . there is no way of finishing of that sentence, I now see.

We have to live our lives, I tell myself, they're all we have. That's how I keep my self-respect on the drive to the hospital. And all stories end the same way. We have to pack the narrative with whatwe have. And quickly, because all this goes like a dream; days turn into weeks; you get up on Monday and then it's Friday.

Whether or not the Post Office has actually lost my prototype doesn't matter any more. We have to start production this month. Everyone's getting sick of this faffing about. So, I put into place the recovery plan. The requirement is finally to test the volume of the product. Rather than make another prototype and send it over and...let's not go into the agonising, month-long details, I've had China send new speakers to us. And guess what? They arrived in Wales, exactly as promised, within five days. Wales has created a working rig and posted it to me overnight. I find myself weeping with pathetic gratitude

My determination was to produce a zero-defect prototype to minimise the risks of production. This sensible precaution is just not feasible any more. But look: we've had the constituent parts all working - just not in the same place and at the same time. Everything on the list does its job. The software. The mechanism. The box. The internal layout. When assembled, it worked defectively; when disassembled it works perfectly.

My bet, then, is that we can go ahead with the tooling. We can make this thing. But without a working prototype, we can't leave it to fate or the factory's professionalism. It just means that I will have to be there for the five days it will take to make 10,000 units. I will go and be the production overseer in an up-country sweatshop.

If only I were a little more risk-averse. But then none of this would be happening if I were risk-averse.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com