Can't you haggle on it ren? knock the fucker down in price some?
Managed to do something like that with my bank. Bastards tried to offer me a measly 20 quid at first for some major and unforgivable incompetent fuckups. I wouldn't back down, and squeezed them for £150 in order not to sue them.
What they don't realize, is I'm going to take the money, and then go to the ombudsman anyway, when they pay only 150, because I fully intend to charge them that sum EACH. Per error. For every single instance they did the same thing. Oh boy, they have a nasty surprise coming.
Although even that £150, that will buy me a nice big set of cupboards refilled with large cans of the various solvents I use, plenty new reagents and refills of stuff I already have and use, plus a few pieces of new glassware. Will keep some behind though, for my saving to buy myself a rotavap, which is right at the very top of my lab wish-list, that and an IR spectrophotometer. UV-vis too, if I can find a place to put it, because I won't put sensitive instrumentation like that in the lab itself, the rotavap, sure, but not things that might have trouble from any acidic or highly alkaline, or otherwise corrosive fumes. Damned if I'd spend thousands of pounds on equipment and then melt the insides. Wasn't too much of a pain with a £20-£25 cheapo lab balance strictly for weighing reagents, with a 10mg resolution, the one I did have and tortured to death with some of the things it had to weigh and eventually got spilled on (it was some SOCl2 that actually struck the death blow, but I could tell it had taken a severe dislike to weighing out the likes of acyl halides, acid anhydrides and certain phosphorus compounds which weren't too friendly either, as well as iodine monochloride and the violently powerful oxidizer CrO2Cl2 (chromyl chloride, a chromium compound that takes the form of a dark liquid, like bromine or ICl in visual appearance, volatile, hydrolyses in atmospheric moisture and reacts violently with water, and with most solvents its incompatible, or likely to cause them to burst into flames)
It served me well, and I'll get another, because there is no sodding WAY I am using my new super-sensitive 1mg resolution scale anywhere NEAR the kinds of things I used the cheaper one to weigh out. I dread to think how much my father paid for that xmas gift, actually I have yet to even use it, although rest assured, it will serve me well indeed. Either a new balance, or possibly a heating mantle with magnetic stirring were what I was hoping for most. Definitely not going to expose such a doubtless expensive bit of equipment to the least bit of anything nasty. Caustic soda is about the worst thing I'd allow near it, and that with great care.
