Erik,

Could there be a relationship between willingness to help and your annual turnover? In my experience, being a very small company, producing custom designed products in (usually) small quantities, it seems that over the past few years the distributors and sales offices have been actively discouraging 'small fry' like myself by introducing rediculous minimum order quantities and/or minimum order prices. Not to mention the fact that you can almost feel the cold contempt when you tell them you need only ten devices...
About a year and a half ago I needed some fairly large FLASH memories, eight of them. Every distributor I called told me that they only delivered them per tray of 90 Mind you, these were $ 10.- devices! I eventually got them from Farnell at $ 18.- or so, still $756.- cheaper.....

Just my bad luck, or did anybody else have similar experiences?

Best regards,
Rob.