Sent the wrong parts.....TWICE

[Dave1982]

So the Greatest Customer of All Time and I have been dealing with a certain specialty car parts dealer that shall remain nameless here. They have now screwed up the same order, TWICE.

What we needed was a pair of leather pull straps.

They sent a pair of STRUTS.

Ok, strut...strap.....sounds similar. But I still have a copy of the order, and it quite clearly has the part number for the STRAPS on it. Not only that, but the struts are more expensive. Rather a dumb mistake.

So TGCOAT called them back, and I ended up speaking with them on a quasi-three way call, and we made DAMN CERTAIN they had the right part number. He also ordered a few other things at the same time. Sent back the wrong parts ON HIS OWN DIME, and today I stopped by his place to help install all the stuff (and by help I mean, I did it while he took a series of conference calls).

Open up the box....

The wrong part.....AGAIN!

They were at least closer this time. They were the pull straps.....but a different version for an earlier model year. I probably could have modified them to fit, but if I'd screwed up we wouldn't be able to exchange for the right part.

Unbelievable. The screw ups are so clearly on their end it's not even funny. Frankly, TGCOAT should not have had to pay the return postage the first time, but did because he isn't a SC.

He had me compose a carefully worded email that he will send, politely requesting that THEY fix THEIR mistake, but without it sounding angry and accusatory.

Seriously though, these guys deal exclusively in parts for this car, and should know better than this. I can see someone at a major parts dealer who works with many different makes and models making this sort of mistake, but not a specialty shop.

Jeeze.

Oh, and I found out that his HVAC blower motor is toasted. As in, flooded with water and rusted to hell and gone.

It's been a frustrating day.

[protege]

Ugh. Been there, done that. This time, it was with the *factory,* instead of a parts retailer. When I still had the Mazda, some idiot tried to break into it. I'd left the passenger-side window down a bit. Rather than simply *break* the window, the genius instead...forced the *glass* down destroying the mechanism.

Took the car to the dealer (who is no longer in business, gee I wonder why ) ...who managed to screw up the order 3 times. Once, I can understand--the order was coded wrong, system screw-up, etc. But, the second and third time, my tolerance tends to disappear. Even more so when it's the middle of winter, and I had to use strips of packing tape to hold the damn window up. My car had that damn tape on it for about a month. Without it, the glass would have fallen down (and possibly shattered) when I went over the first bump!

I'm a bit more understanding when it comes to the MG. The factory would sometimes change part types mid-way through the model year...and occasionally not change the part numbers! Annoying, but usually workable--either order with the VIN or engine number...or ask on one of the many message boards.

[PepperElf]

oooh yeah i've had it happen at work in the navy. now granted the supply system isn't always messed up but sometimes they do some weird things...

first ship: co-workers took a broken part of the radar and gave it to supply, cos it has to be inventoried and sent off via specific channels before it's destroyed. New part is received... it's the same broken part they'd sent off.

second ship: i'm not totally sure what happened... but from what I can gather, we'd turned a network switch card into supply and they lost it. they tried to claim they didn't and produced a card as proof... until one of the guys said, "um.. that's a radar circuit card in your hand"

Shore calibration command: I don't know why we had an AN/URQ-23 frequency standard, but we had one. We sent it off to another site for periodic calibration. The site we were using at the time was rather slow...but it had been even longer than expected, so we called them up to ask for the status. They said they'd call us back.

We found out what happened before they did. They had sent it to our building but to the wrong department. The people who received it had no idea what to do with it, and were preparing to issue it to one of the ships headed off on deployment.

We tried calling the off-site cal lab to tell them, but they wouldn't pick up. M figured they were using caller-id to avoid talking to us for a bit... so I handed him my cell phone. They answered on the first ring and were... quite surprised to hear it was M.

Boy were they embarrassed. If that item had been sent off, they would have owed us a new one. And they don't come cheap... can't find a price on them online but I know it's not an easy item to replace.

[Dave1982]

Oh ho ho ho......military supply stories.....I've heard a few of those.....

My uncle (former tanker in the national guard) once told me about a screwup......

He said this took place shortly after the US military switched over to a unified supply ordering/numbering system (instead of each branch having their own system). They needed to order 2000+ fire-retardant uniforms for their tank crewman.

Not too much later, they got 50, with a note that the rest were back-ordered. Odd, since this was something in use by every armor unit in the Army and should have been in abundant supply.

So they ripped open the crate and found not tank uniforms, but Air Force issue arctic parkas, made from actual animal pelts. The type of parkas that were issued to ground crewman in such garden spots at Thule AFB, Greenland or Eielson AFB, Alaska. Not the sort of thing you'd want to wear inside a tank.

Turns out someone had typed a single number incorrectly when placing the order, resulting in a totally different SKU being ordered. They had to cancel that order, send back the 50 parkas, and eventually they got what they needed.

A former co-worker (also in the National Guard) told me about a similar screw-up that resulted in an anchor designed for a Nimitz-class carrier being delivered to a landlocked Army post. A couple of heads rolled for THAT mistake.

[Andara Bledin]

As a worker for a supplier of parts to the military, I've lived a few of those.

Mostly, however, we profit from the inability of a large percentage of the population to correctly label something that is taking a trip through US customs.

My favorite is when some military branch has managed to lose something (bonus points when it's classified and not supposed to be out of their hands) and we manage to acquire it (through legal channels, mind you) and then they come barging in and threatening us claiming that we are somehow thieves because they can't keep track of their own parts.

^-.-^

[AccountingDrone]

A former co-worker (also in the National Guard) told me about a similar screw-up that resulted in an anchor designed for a Nimitz-class carrier being delivered to a landlocked Army post. A couple of heads rolled for THAT mistake.

mrDrone told me about that one, and apparently there is a 3 number difference between some obscure part for a heat seal machine and an armored corvette [car not vessel] They *needed* a part for a heat seal machine ... he didnt mean to get NIS in an uproar about ordering a corvette ...

[lordlundar]

A former co-worker (also in the National Guard) told me about a similar screw-up that resulted in an anchor designed for a Nimitz-class carrier being delivered to a landlocked Army post. A couple of heads rolled for THAT mistake.

Did it get displayed as a statue symbolizing "military Intelligence"?