Following on from last week's post that someone made about a wrong order. A few days ago, I ordered some 28 AWG bus wire (tinned copper wire) from Farnell. 28 AWG is listed in most tables as being 0.321 mm diameter. The Farnell catalogue has it down as 0.33 mm, so close enough. When it arrived, and I finally managed to get through the 36 layers of industrial strength clingfilm wrapped around the spool, the wire that I found inside was like the old 5 amp fuse wire.
So, I got out my digital calipers, and checked out the first half metre or so, and got a pretty consistent 0.27 mm ...
I make that about 30 AWG. The roll was correctly labeled at 28 AWG and had the correct Farnell part number. So I emailed Farnell Technical, who used to be very good. I got an automated reply that said that they would look into my enquiry within 24 hours. Almost a day later, I got a reply that basically said "Oh dear. Alpha must have sent us the wrong product". No further explanation. No confirmation that they had checked further examples and found the same as me. No indication of what they were going to do about it or in what timeframe. So I emailed the guy back to ask him these further questions. And the mail got dumped back into the system, with an automated reply that they would look into my enquiry within 24 hours ... >:-(
Again, almost a day later, I got a mail from some girl in customer liason to say that as the value of the wrong item was small, I could keep it. There was then a highly ambiguous sentence, mainly because of really poor grammar, that may or may not indicate that another reel might soon be on its way.
I totally despair when a company like Farnell goes down the toilet like this. In the past, when you contacted technical, you got a reply within a few minutes, and the person who responded became your contact with their own email address, to see the query through to the end. Now, that all seems to have gone out of the window.
I suppose that in order to save even more money, as if they are not making enough extra by charging £3.95 on small orders for a 10p Jiffy bag and 50p of postage, they have reduced technical to one snot-nosed kid fresh out of school ...
Arfa