Why can a customer s**t in a vendors lap, but the vendor can't s**t in the customers lap?
Believe me, it goes both ways.
I've been on both sides of the equation, and I get my share of vendors dumping on me. Not all of them, but enough that I spend a good portion of my time getting them to comply.
And it's all well and good to say "Hold them to the spec", but there are a few bad apples out there who never intended to comply to the spec. And the truly slick players have friends at headquarters who have been known to come down on me when I complain. Not that it does any good...
A few examples:
We contracted the services of a drives company who charged $220/hour, and the guy shows up and starts correcting his prints. I told him that this wasn't what we were paying him for (after all, fixing the prints is on them), but he just told me that this was the way it was going to be.
Then there was that time a balancer company sent their tech out to the plant, but he never showed up. Come to find out, his son was stationed at a post close by so he simply took the rental car that we were paying for and headed down to see him. Calling up his office got him turned back around...
Probably the most egregious was a process company who designed the heads for our brake fill equipment. They didn't work well, so our Maintenance guys designed their own heads, built them, and drew up the prints for them. The company got hold of the prints and used a direct copy of them for a competitor's machine. Our guys caught them when they were at the company for some unrelated business and saw our prints laying out *still with our name on them* as part of the build set for the competitor's equipment.
Now the other side of the coin...
As a contractor, I have been forced to fix programming for unrelated processes, just because it resided in our PLC. That wasn't so bad, one of our guys was forced to work on a completely unrelated piece of equipment, including supplying parts for it!
And a somewhat typical ploy is the "junior engineer" who tells you that he has a field order, so go ahead and do the work. When it comes time to settle up, the senior engineer makes a show of chewing him out and claims that he only had the authority to sign off on $1500 of work (this happened to us in Canada).