Well, I suspect this will get ugly at some point.

We deal with a wide variety of customers in terms of their technical knowledge. Since we sell a lot of small parts, this really does come into play. However, we've been selling these parts for over a decade and have put together lots of photos and diagrams to help people understand what we need to know to help them. We've also answered the same basic questions many, many times so a lot of our responses are rote by now.

Usually, that is.

Last week we sold a small part to a customer. Everything went fine and that should have been it. Then we received an email about a failed part from this customer. It's unfortunate, but it happens.

So we started the process of determining the cause and getting the right replacement part to them. To do this, we need to understand WHY the part failed so it doesn't happen again. So we start with basic questions:
1. How did you install the part (hammer?)
2. Where did you buy the original wheel?
3. Can we please get the serial number on the hub so we can confirm we are looking at the right model and therefore providing the correct parts.

This is where it goes south.

Question number 2 is particularly important. Right now, there are fake Novatec hubs from China floating around. They are close to the originals in spec (not materials) but not exact. We have seen this same failure before from installing actual Novatec parts in one of these fake hubs so we had to confirm this as the cause or rule it out.

The response?
"You sold me this thing. Give me a new one"
Our reply? " We will, but we need to make sure of a few things so this won't happen again." So we asked the same questions again.
And Again.
And again.
And again.

Then it was "I don't know what a hub is."

We sent photos and asked the same questions again.

That looped us back to the very beginning. Rinse and repeat.

Then, "You sold me this wheel. Give me the part".

We don't sell Novatec wheels.

We sent a photo of a wheel and said, "We didn't sell this to you. We sold you this part (another photo) but we need to know where the wheel came from"

And on and on.

Now we are being called names, accused of being scammers, etc, etc.

Some people just can't be helped.

Any other bad customer stories or I WAS A BAD CUSTOMER stories?