The mess around every parcel

A woman in Abu Dhabi sells board games online from a spare room. When an order comes in, she is relying on a long chain of people she has never met.

The games come from a publisher in Europe, through a distributor in Jebel Ali, then a freight company, then customs. Her website runs on software made by one firm, takes payment through another and sends emails through a third. A print shop in Mussafah makes her rule cards. A delivery firm collects the parcels, and its drivers decide, more or less, which street comes first. Her customer reads the confirmation on a phone built by one company and filled with apps from dozens more.

None of these people answer to her. Most do not know she exists.

For her first year she treated that as a problem to fix. She wanted one supplier, one system, one partner who would make everything run smoothly from end to end. She lost weeks looking for it.

It does not exist, for her or for anyone. The tidy, single, controlled operation belongs in films about the future. In practice the tangle grows. Each year there are more parts, made by more people, joined more loosely.

So the useful work is not control. It is choosing partners who usually keep their word, leaving a little slack where the chain tends to break, writing clear instructions where she can, and nudging the parts she cannot command. A parcel that arrives on time is a small agreement among strangers, and her job is to make that agreement easier to keep.

The mess is not a flaw in her business. It is what every business is made of.