On the sixteenth of August 2023, twenty-two days before we opened, the panel saw would not come down off the forklift.

The leading edge of it was touching the floor of my workshop and the rest of it was hanging out over four steps and a pavement. Touching is not resting. There was not enough weight on the tile to hold it, so it sat balanced between the forks and the floor, and four or five men stood around it with their hands flat on the metal, pushing. It moved in centimetres. What I could see was not the machine falling. It was the afterwards: a saw on its side across a broken step, and me working out how you lift a wrecked machine off a staircase and then still get it through a door.

Our showroom is up four steps. It had never once been a problem, and it had never once been a thought. For two years I had drawn floor plans and argued about cable thickness, and in none of it had I written down the words four steps.

There was also a kerb, because a small car park faces the entrance. The forklift ran in at the steps and stopped dead when its wheels hit the first one. It cannot climb. The moment the front wheels came up, the back end went down and grounded on the kerb behind. Blocked forward by the step, blocked back by the pavement, with one of the heaviest things I owned sitting up on the forks in between.

I stood there and did nothing, because there was nothing for me to do. What was in my head was not courage. I was picturing myself crying in the workshop, in front of the whole team, that afternoon.

I do not think there is a version of that day I come out of well.

What broke it in the end was not clever. They drove the forklift at the first step until the wheels finally got up onto it, and that last shove put the machine far enough forward that its weight came over the floor. We had a hand pallet truck inside, the kind you pump by hand. Once the saw settled onto that, we could get the forks all the way under it and pull it in from within.

There was no shout. The weight simply went from balanced to carried, and I let go of a breath I had been holding since about eleven in the morning.

After that the crew built a ramp out of thick wooden boards, thick enough to take some of the forklift as well as the machine, running from the level of the workshop floor down over the four steps to the pavement. Once it existed, everything else went up it. It took from eleven in the morning until five or six in the evening to move every machine the length of a room. I stayed for all of it. I could not have sat at home while it was happening in my building.

For two years I had planned around everything I knew, and I had never looked at the door.

The following April, Dubai had a week of rain that nobody living here had seen the like of, and the city flooded.

The Makers Society did not. It sits at the top of four steps.

I did not design those steps, and I never gave them a thought. On the sixteenth of August they were the worst thing about the building. The thing that very nearly destroyed everything I owned was the same thing that kept the water off it. Nobody told me which it would turn out to be, and nobody could have.

I think about that more than I think about the machines. There is a list of things in this business I am currently annoyed at, and I no longer trust it. Some of what I resent is doing a job I cannot see yet.

The steps are still there. I go up them to open the door, and I have never done it without noticing them.

Luca