Expectations are a terrible thing. The gulag, my last place of work, was/is a Fortune 500 company and a very large manufacturing entity in the region, and the #1 taxpayer in its county. Most people in this thriving midget metropolis know where it is and what it does. If you sell something, it is the #1 stop to make, because if you can make it there (albeit temporarily unless you are a huge BKL), you can make it anywhere. As the place is populated by whiskers and tails in the management ranks, and sometimes below that, if something goes wrong they always (and I mean always) look for someone to blame. It’s most convenient to blame the vendors and the contractors, since by their very nature they are transient. If we ran one of them off, whether it was their fault or not, there was always another willing to take their place. And there really wasn’t any point for them to make a fuss about it, because they become nobody really quickly.
In these little games of pin the tail on the rat I tended to side with the person who was blameless, and usually that person was the vendor. It was common for them to come to me to plead their case. Sometimes I could get them off the flagpole, when they deserved it and I felt I could win, and sometimes I counseled them to apologize and try to get on with life, even if they were right. Someone in management noticed that I was playing nice (really just playing fair) and chastised me for “not knowing how things are done around here” which really just convinced me that I was right.
WIIFM? Well, I found I could get better service than my peers. If I really needed a part guys would return my calls and get stuff on planes when I asked. It’s a simple concept. Unfortunately I got accustomed to it.
Fast forward to now, and I’m finding things much harder. The new place is small, unfamiliar to most folks, and, yes, new. It’s a different industry and many of the vendors are new to me. My calls don’t get returned, even when I say the magic words “buy” and “credit card”. I have called the same dunce five times to try to get a replacement pump, and each time he says he’ll quote it and each time he blows me off. And he is the only person in that office who deals with this brand of pump. I even tried to buy it straight from the manufacturer and they referred me back to the dunce. That was after I told them that he was costing them sales because he was so inattentive (though they might have put off by my use of the words “moron”, “troll” and “makes Justin Bieber look like a genius”)…
Even as useless as he was, he will not win the utterly-screwed-up-vendor world title. Here’s the sad tale…
We purchased two boilers from a company in California . Steam generators, really, very small compared to what I worked on in the past. They have never performed adequately. We have had their service people in on multiple occasions, and they invariably leave before fixing our problems. I promise that we once had a service guy drive out of our parking lot while at the same time the boiler decided to sh_t the bed, and the guy would not pick up his cell phone even though he had not hit the first stop sign. They had to fly another guy up from Cali to help us two days later. This is just the most egregious example – there are others. I thought the service guys were abominable, but I hadn’t yet experienced the truly heinous dumassery of their parts dept.
Even though they are based in LALAland, their parts folks are on the east coast. My first expedition with them should have been simple – I needed a temperature probe because (of course) the service guy could not fix our boiler without it. I called back east and played phone tag with a rep for two days because she refused to call my cell phone even though I had asked in my message to call both office and hip. When I finally connected with her, I gave her their part number from their OEM manual and SHE COULDN”T FIGURE OUT WHAT PART I NEEDED! Then she told me they hadn’t used that part in years, and would not believe me when I told her we had just purchased the boiler last year. She replied, “Oh.” And a long pause, then: “I guess I’ll look it up then…” Gee, thanks. When she finally clued in, she announced that they did not have any in stock and they would have to get it from their vendor (an occurrence not unusual in this day and age – no one wants to carry working capital any more). I thought that was OK and proceeded to give her our address for the shipment. But no. She had to get it shipped to them first so they could modify it to their specs, and then she would ship it to me. Long story somewhat shorter, their vendor was a day’s drive from us and the only mod they made was to stamp their mythical part number on it. And this is not the worst story.
The feedwater pump for one of these demented boilers is a standard tri-plex piston pump, which is available from several good manufacturers in the US . They bought theirs from an outfit in India , which had obviously reverse-engr’d one of the good US manufacturers’ pumps. The quality of this thing is abysmal – the tolerances aren’t even close – but the price must have been right. We blew the thing up after about 300 operating hours. And then the real fun started.
I bought all the generic parts from local vendors, knowing that the boiler folks were not likely to have any of it and would likely get it wrong anyway. I was stuck when it came to the piston – the Indian guys had changed the dimensions just enough to (I suppose) keep from getting sued, and I had to get one from them. So a call back east. No, they didn’t have one. Yes, they’d get one on a plane. Yes, tomorrow. Then they proceeded to charge my credit card three times for the same part. When no part arrived by the promised date I called and was informed that it hadn’t been ordered yet. Why not? “Because it’s hard to call India .” Someone needs to tell this to Microsoft. Anyway, then they sent me a tracking number when they finally shipped it, and when I logged in to UPS I found that they could not possibly have sent it farther away and kept it within the same country. When I called to point this out they tried very hard to make me feel unreasonable. They swore they would get it back from the poor bastid who was about to receive it and redirect it my way, but they didn’t call UPS for three days, and in that time the poor bastid who received it had mistaken it for a nail and had beaten the crap out of it. Now I’m just getting started with this story…
What? You’ve heard enough? Wait…just thumbnails then. Tried to repair, no dice but sent it to me anyway, I compared to original and told them to order a new one, they didn’t even though they said they did, still don’t have one, took original to local machine shop and had one made in 3 hours but now I lie awake at night knowing that it aint right and I’m going to have to do this all again. Whew. Done.
I’m going to have a lot more wrinkles before I ever see a piston from these bozos…
P.S. Wouldn’t you know the piston showed up the day after I wrote this…
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