So I call them up “Hi, my DVD player, order ref #, doesn’t work”. “oh, I’m sorry, sir, what’s wrong with it?” “The disk never spins up, despite the display reading ‘Loading’”. “Ok, we’ll dispatch one now and you’ll receive pre-9am tomorrow. Don’t bother returning the broken one”. 2 minute phone call, no bullshit. Imagine that from Curries! Sure enough, the replacement arrived as promised and worked nicely.

I think part of the reason for this customer service gulf is that Farnell sell almost entirely business-to-business. Nobody has time to waste, and everyone involved is prepared to shell out an extra couple of quid to get the job done. Unfortunately, in the consumer world, it’s become de-rigeur to treat the individual customer like shit because they have little buying power and nobody to complain to. Perhaps blog posts like this will begin to turn the tide, but it’s going to be slow!

Website maintenance seems less important when you’re hiding in your fridge from customers with crossbows.

Could all this careful oven calibration help you to create a genuine naan, perhaps using surface cheese tension to keep some kind of curried chicken components in place? Let’s face it, a whole lot tastier than pcb, and therefore more useful.

Glad I could help!

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does the same thing as the python and makes it easy to handle other tags cleanly (just add another rule for that tag).