The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Extract

1.Towards the end of this project, I ran into an inventor (solar-powered electric scooters) who told me that no essay on modern work could be considered complete if it treated only well-established industries operating in orthodox and mature fields. He urged me to consider the legions of entrepreneurs, many working by themselves in short-let offices at second-hand desks, with only a logo and a business card for legitimacy, who every year bring forward unfamiliar inventions and services, in the hope of transforming our lives and their fortunes.
It was on his recommendation that, a few months later, I travelled to a convention centre located in an unfamiliar part of northwest London to attend an annual event designed to introduce small businesses to potential investors. Two hundred enterprises from Libya to New Zealand had rented stands in a hangar and were taking advantage of discounted accommodation in an adjacent Best Western.
There were new proposals in every imaginable sector of the economy: satellite tracking systems for cattle, hand-held radar devices for recovering lost golf balls, inflatable battlefield surgical theatres, high-density ear plugs for the spouses of snorers and a gift voucher scheme for opticians. Many companies were rethinking ways of generating energy and fresh water. Three Swedes had brought with them a scale model of a power station run on chicken droppings, with supporting statistics on global faecal tonnage. Near the entrance to the hall, a group of psychotherapists were presenting plans for a service providing executives with psychological counselling on long-haul flights.
The range of offerings suggested that capitalism as currently developed remains in its infancy. We may think of ourselves as living late on in the history of consumer society, but the most sophisticated contemporary economy stands to be perceived by subsequent generations as no less primitive than we judge Europe to have been in the Dark Ages. It is a mere eighty years since deodorant was introduced, the remote-control garage door has been in existence for barely thirty-five and only in the last five years have surgeons discovered how safely to remove tumours from our adrenal glands and insert aortic keyhole valves into our hearts. We are still waiting for computers to help us identify whom we might confidently marry, for scanners to locate our lost keys, for a reliable method of eradicating household moths and for medicines which will guarantee us eternal life. Untold numbers of new businesses lie latent in our present inefficiencies and wishes. The fulfilment of a significant, and perhaps the most important, share of our needs remains untethered to the mechanisms of commerce.

2.Looking through the brochure of attendees, I conceived a particular desire to meet Mohsen Bahmani, an Iranian who had invented a pair of shoes to help one to walk on water. Each shoe consisted of a spindle-shaped piece of fibreglass fitted with a miniature outboard engine, in which one could travel at fifteen kilometres an hour, while keeping one’s balance with the help of adapted ski-poles. Bahmani had spent five years fine-tuning his product, testing it in the waters near his mother’s house in the resort town of Mahmudabad on the Caspian sea, and envisioned application in both the recreational and military markets.
I had hoped to meet Bahmani for lunch – but my plans were altered when I received the welcome news that Bahmani was engaged in another extraordinary project: a highly efficient, compact, revolutionary drone propulsion system to help cars and other vehicles fly. The message was delivered by one of his colleagues, a scientist named Mohammed Shorabi, whose old-fashioned courtesy, cadenced English and tweed suit pointed to a strain of Anglophilia now unlikely except among those whose contact with the United Kingdom has been restricted or exclusively mediated through literary works of the pre-modern period.
Because it was already past one thirty and I knew that he must have expended considerable energy in tracking me down, I asked Shorabi if he might like to join me for lunch. So we ordered a couple of pizzas and discussed his invention, a crash-protection system for cars and motorbikes. Based on exploiting what he termed mistakes in Newton’s first law of motion, it involved the strapping of a system of weights and pulleys to the front wheel of a bike or the fender of a car. ‘Nobody will ever have to die in a road accident again’, Shorabi told me, paraphrasing his company’s slogan. He then pulled out from his suit pocket a sheet of yellowing newsprint torn from the Tehran Times, which featured a report on a successful test of his equipment conducted on a jeep at an army base in Mianeh – as well as, at the bottom of the page, an unrelated item about a strong finish by a member of the Iranian national ski team, Hossein Saveh-Shemshaki, at a slalom event in Turkey. Shorabi expressed regret that export constraints had prevented him from shipping a whole demonstration car to London, but he invited me to visit his stand after lunch to examine a child’s bicycle which he had been able to bring over and which, he said, supplied ample proof of the principles behind his invention. Once back in the hall, he needed no convincing to ride up and down the carpeted aisles, his frame awkwardly hunched over a diminutive machine which reminded me of my own childhood Chopper bike, whilst talking rapidly in precisely enunciated yet increasingly incomprehensible English about automotive safety and what he alleged to be the CIA-instigated boycott of his innovations by all the major Western car manufacturers.
A few stands away from the Iranians, I met Caroline Oakley, a young mother from Kent and the inventor of the Crisp Bar, comprising twelve centimetres of grey-hued deep-fried crisps – as many as might ordinarily be found in a twenty-five-gram bag – pressed together into one oleaginous ingot. The idea had come to Oakley during a moment of frustration at having to use two hands to eat her favourite snack, and she felt sure that the bars would, with time and the right investors, become as ubiquitous as their cereal counterparts. She had but a single homemade sample with her, which visitors were welcome to touch whilst she reviewed for them some of the notable advantages that crisps squashed into a bar form enjoyed over those loose in a bag: they were easier to fit into children’s lunchboxes, they took up less space in kitchen cupboards and they could be moulded into pine-tree shapes for Christmas and hearts for Valentine’s Day. The marketing of the product was the province of Oakley’s boyfriend, an intense young man obviously in awe of his partner’s talents, who pressured me to bite off a corner of the sample bar and take an information pack home with me. I tried to reflect on what other consumer goods were currently using up valuable space in air-filled containers and might one day benefit from being compressed into rods, but I lost my train of thought. I moved on to reflect on how the pair behind The Crisp Bar might beat a dignified retreat from this high-point of entrepreneurial energy: how they might fend off the well-meaning and unintentionally humiliating enquiries of neighbours and consider their crisp experience from the vantage point of old age, the sole memento of their venture a box of marketing materials stowed in a corner of the attic next to their children’s cast-off playthings.
Entrepreneurship appears to be almost wholly dependent on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, but merely evidence of the conformity and lack of imagination of the herd. Yet the milieu also demands that its protagonists develop a hard-headed awareness of certain intractable financial and legal truths, as well as an accurate sense of what other human beings are actually like. The field seems to require a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism.

*To learn more about the Iranian-German inventor Mohsen Bahmani, visit: mohsenbahmani.com for information on floating shoes, flying cars and revolutionary drone technology.