gacrowell@micron.com wrote:
> Shipping horror story - we routinely order microprobes from the company
> warehouse.  These are the really tiny probes used to probe wafers on a
> probe station.  They come individually in a small protective plastic
> box.  For some unknown reason the warehouse workers were taking them out
> of the boxes, shoving them in a plastic bag, and sending them to us.
> $600 a pop, utterly destroyed.  (multiple times)

Probably not quite as bad, but annoying all the same...
Last week I bought four Altera FPGAs - 144-pin TQFP. Small, and a pig to 
solder at the best of times. There were none left at the UK warehouse, so a 
set were duly ordered in from a warehouse in Belgium and drop-shipped to me.

Catch: whoever packaged them decided to take them out of the factory hard 
plastic tape/reel package, and shoved them into waffle-cut ESD foam.

Catch 2: The square holes in the ESD foam were obviously designed for 
something about the size of a SOIC-28 chip. Far too small for the QFPs. So 
they shoved the chips into said holes.

All but one arrived with the pins utterly mashed. I complained and another 
batch of four were ordered from Belgium, along with a note on the order to the 
effect of "leave them in factory packaging". So what happened next?

You guessed it. Same thing again.

Though thankfully the second batch of four arrived mostly intact... Three out 
of four usable from the second batch, plus the one usable from the first batch.

But seriously. WTF?

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