The saga continues. If you don't want to hear it, hit the DEL key now! Shortly after my last diatribe, a couple of people emailed me privately to assure me that screwups from AS&S were "isolated incidents" and that they'd never had any problems. I wish I could say that too!
Saturday I recieved a cryptic notice in the mail from AS&S. It had "please return this portion with your remittance" stamped at the top in red ink, but after a few minutes of studying the thing, I deduced that I didn't actually owe them any money, they were just informing me that indeed they were going to send me one of the ten things I'd ordered. Whew...that's a relief! I wonder about the rest? Today I came home to a message from AS&S asking me to please call them and talk to their customer service folks. Apparently somebody forwarded them my email message, and they wanted to smooth things over. I'm not sure what they plan to say, but I assure you that no words will help convince me of anything other than the place is in total chaos, and it's a miracle that people ever actually recieve things they order from them. I called, waited 8 minutes for a human to answer (I'll bet I've never had to wait more than 8 SECONDS for people at Wicks to answer), and was told she was "unavailable, call back later". I called back an hour later, and she's "stepped out to the warehouse". I'm still waiting on her to return my call. So I find a UPS box on the back porch, along with a Priority Mail envelope. N56ML stickers are in the envelope, some other stuff in the box. I'm clueless as to why they couldn't have both come in the same box, but then I'm not a logistics expert. A careful examination of the box shows that the position sensor (the thing that forced me to order from them in the first place) WASN'T EVEN IN THE BOX! Why does that not surprise me? Because the guy in CA told me he had one, but they didn't have one in GA, but the next week they told me that everything I wanted was in GA, and they'd ship it. Not only was it not in the box, it wasn't even on the invoice. And two trim indicator labels that WERE on the invoice, and I was charged for, were also NOT in the box. Hmm, another isolated incident I guess, but for me, this is typical of any order I've placed with AS&S. I just can't fathom how flawlessly Wicks does their job, never skipping a beat, after several hundred orders from me, and when I place one order a year with AS&S, it invaribly turns into some kind of fiasco. So AS&S just called, explaining that there must have been a computer glitch or something, but that they were sure it was just an isolated incident. To me, that's about four or five "isolated incidents" in one order, so I'm not convinced! Supposedly they will now ship my position sensor from CA, along with the two missing labels. We'll see. So let's recap: -it took them 20 minutes to tell me that they had something in stock -they made me "confirm" by email or fax something that I'd ordered, like maybe I wasn't sure? -they told me it was all in stock, but on Monday they called to say the switches were backordered -they were supposed to ship it all on Monday, 3 day UPS red, but simply forgot to EVER ship it -they sent me an invoice telling me the thing I'd confirmed, was actually going to ship -the one thing I REALLY wanted, they left out of the box, and off the invoice -two more items were also not in the box, but I was charged for them anyway -a three day order has now turned into a THIRTEEN day order Yep, I know....I'm just a malcontent. Sorry for ventilating in your direction. Whoever forwarded that last one to Jim Irwin is welcome to do that again. It's been a while since I talked to him about this kind of stuff anyway, and it looks like he could use another ear full... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
