Had I known I would not see a fork (or any other utensil except chopsticks) for the next 10 days perhaps I would have stuck an extra bunch of cutlery in my suitcase. But hey, here I am in the midst of Chinese culture and the food and the way I eat it will just have to be what it is.
Here is a picture of a Baozi, a typical breakfast food of the Chinese.
China, you might ask?
I just returned from visiting China with the business of getting the Paint Spy produced, which is an analog paint thickness gauge.
The Paint Spy is a device that the Car Angel Team has been working on for the last six months. It is a high quality device that has been engineered to detect paint thickness on cars so that anyone, regardless of their car knowledge, will be able to determine if the car they are buying has been in an accident. After using other inferior versions I decided to design a better tool. Since it is my job, my duty really, to see that people who buy cars make good investments and don’t get screwed, I need to provide them with an easy to use tool to make the inspection of a potential car purchase as effective as possible. An accident free car is the single most important criteria in finding and purchasing a high quality vehicle. For the record, although a Carfax is a necessity, it cannot give you any guarantees that a car is accident free. There is no replacement for an accident inspection. The Paint Spy becomes an important tool for that critical inspection.
On this trip I visited over 7 Chinese factories that make up the various components of the Paint Spy. Of interest to me is the level of workmanship, and overall quality of the tool that we will have manufactured here in Shenzhen, but I am also interested in the factory workers, the environments they work in, their lifestyles and their culture of work.
The first question many people ask about the manufacturing process is why I couldn’t have all this production done in the U.S. Certainly the design and engineering was done entirely here in California. But in order for our product to be competitively priced, having it produced in China was my only real choice. We are partnering up with a California company Blue Ox Industrials Ltd for our development and manufacturing arm. They have brought many high quality products to market, so we are in very good hands.