I have 500 resistors designed like this:
That's brown, red, black, black, brown. Roughly equal spacing between all bands. 120 ohms, right? No. This is a 10k resistor: brown, black, black, red, brown.
Why would they label it this way? They could easily have labeled it brown, yellow, SPACE, brown and it would be obvious how to read it. Am I missing some technique?