Paul Hynes: Customer Service Problems

[mozes]

40 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

When dealing with overseas suppliers, especially small companies and mom & pop concerns, your money is always at risk. Let me tell you my tail of woe (not audio related) Back in 1968, fresh out of college and working in the aerospace industry, I found a very old Ferrari sitting in the weeds of an unkempt front yard of a cottage in Santa Rosa CA. I had become lost coming back from my first trip to Bodega Bay in my Jaguar XK140MC Roadster which was my only transportation at that time, and stumbled into this residential section of Santa Rosa. Curious about the vecchio (very old) Ferrari, I stopped and walked up to the door and knocked. An elderly lady answered and I asked her if the Ferrari was hers and if she wanted to sell it. She told me that it had belonged to her son, who had been killed in Viet Nam. She asked me in and fed me a piece of cake and a Coke and we talked for a few minutes. Finally she said that if I could haul the car away, She'd sign the title over to me gratis. I thanked her, followed her instructions back to US101 and made my way back to San Jose. The following Saturday, my room mate and I in his big Dodge took a single car trailer back up to Santa Rosa to pick-up my "new" Ferrari. While loading the car onto the trailer, we noticed that the right-hand drive shaft was broken as it slid out of the axel housing as we moved the car. 

 

Being just a kid, I didn't really know anything about fixing up old cars, so I assumed that I would have to get a new axel half-shaft from the Ferrari factory in Italy. Naively, before work one morning I placed a call to Ferrari SPA in Maranello, Italy. I found an operator at the factory who spoke English, and she put me through to the parts dept., and stayed on the line to translate for us. The parts man told me that they had all the plans for the 1952 212Inter MM that I had (I gave him the serial number off the builder's plate on the firewall). He told me that they could make me a new pair of shafts and ship them to me for the Italian Lira equivalent of US$1200. I went to my bank, extracted $1200 from my meager savings (yeah, it just about cleaned me out) and had the bank do an international wire exchange of funds payable Automobile Ferrari SPA of Maranello Italy. I attached everything that the parts guy told me to attach to that wire transfer to make sure that it got to the right people and they knew what the money was for - and I waited.

Months passed with me rushing home from work expecting to find a freight package from Italy awaiting me. Needless to say, it never came. I tried calling the factory again, and this time, I could find no operator who spoke English. I tried several more times and even though I had the name of the parts dept. supervisor that I had ordered the part from, I could never reach him. A couple of years later, a colleague of mine was going to Northern Italy to visit his Italian wife's family and it turned out that they lived in another suburb of Modena, so I asked him if he could stop by the Ferrari Factory and inquire about my !@#$%^&* axels! He said he would be happy to do so, and I gave him all the pertinent information. When he returned, he said that even with his wife doing the translating, the PR office at the factory seemed to not grasp what he was asking about. Anyway, he did not get to talk to the parts guy who's name I gave him, nor did he gat any satisfaction. I never got the axels and I never got my money back. I sold the Ferrari, subsequently, for you guessed it - $1200. When I asked the buyer what he was going to do about the broken half-shaft, he said: "Oh, I'll take it a really good automotive machine shop I know of just off of West San Carlos Street in San Jose, and have them machine me out a new one by copying the good one as they are both identical to one another!" Being able to get it done locally, had never even occurred to me! One of those forehead slapping moments that we all have as we live and learn.

 

I saw the car again, in the Ferrari corral at Concorso Italiano in Monterey Ca., a few years ago and I spoke with the then current owner (who was not the guy who bought it from me) and told him that I had once owned the car, and related my tale of woe. He made me feel even worse when he told me that he had earlier in the day been offered $2.7 million for the car and turned it down......

Below is the picture I snapped at the Concorso Italiano some years ago of the very 212 Inter MM that I owned.Don't I wish I had held on to it?

OMG what a story! Thanks for sharing.