LOL QV. No harm done though, and now she has twice the credit on her phone. She was already willing to spend on a top up card, just means you've got her one too so she lucked out.
*sends my well wishes to the PR*
You go there, crafty lil' cutie
Me...meds, watched star trek double bill as I do every weekday, TOS then enterprise. Almost choked on a really cheap ass knockoff candy, something called 'coloured kubes', which are like cola kubes, only not all tasting of cola flavouring, and brightly coloured with various flavours. Very sour too.
I went to swallow a well-sucked one, and found I hadn't eaten it to a small enough size. With the square shape, it was big enough to go down my neck, but I could FEEL it stuck at the bottom, past my airway, so I could breathe fine, but it was just sitting there, squatting in the bottom of my oesophagus like an evicted baby who refuses to leave.
For about an hour. Every time I swallowed, it was there, not painful but uncomfortable sensation of blockage. In the end I managed to get rid of it with the copious administration of beer to dissolve it bit by bit. Suppose I could have tried sticking my fingers down my throat like a teen model or celebrity movie star, but for one, I didn't want it to be launched back up, only to lodge in my airway, so down there past it was the lesser of the two evils.
And lots of beer by far a preferable medication.
Now...I'm sitting down at the computer, about to scoff my way through a box of jaffa cakes, washing them down with....wait for it...more beer
and have a cigar before going to begin recrystallization of a certain yellow, crystalline compound derived from a substituted benzene ring and some side shrubbery. And then test the melting point again, after water washing it, and reducing it with sodium borohydride to remove a pesky little double bond. Already washed it with sodium bisulfite solution to get rid of any remaining traces of one of the reagents used to make it, now time to clean it up, as the melting point is too low when tested by packing a few milligrams into a microcapillary tube, that has been flame-sealed at one end over the cooker (so I don't need to use any gas in either of my blowtorches) then into the melting point apparatus it goes.
Oh, and splashed out a bit. Bought 5 liters of dichloromethane, 250g ammonium formate and 3 liters of 85% conc. formic acid. Most of those coming from the good folk of soviet bloc countries, and not some greedy, grasping piece of shit from the US. (No, I am not prejudiced against americans, its that ebay chemical sellers are liars about the shipping fees. Almost fifty dollars, to send a 30g amount of a non-hazardous chemical in a small plastic bottle? come off it. The item itself, ammonium formate, not that I bought mine from the US, sod that, cost over a dollar a gram too. And it's a very very simple salt of the simplest carboxylic acid, and ammonia, both multi-megatonne industrial commodities annually, not something precious, or hard to get or make.)
It is a lie, and a ripoff, pure and simple. What they are selling isn't worth what they are demanding, for one, and the shipping fees are just profiteering. I bet it cost a few dollars to send those items at such weights, in plastic pots. Just short of $50 US, to send one ounce and two grams of chemicals, plus the weight of a little plastic pot?
For our US spectrumites, what ARE genuine shipping fees like there, roughly? Because it's mighty suspicious that say, poland, lithuania, russia and china can ALL manage free shipping, on a kilogram-weight of material plus it's packaging container. While the US reagent sellers have to stump up almost 50 dollars for a tiny little lightweight plastic container with just over one ounce of an inoffensive, non-hazardous material in it. No?
(Well, the ammonium formate WOULD be toxic, if consumed, but that would require somebody to open it, and start dipping a spoon in and eating what would doubtless be a disgusting tasting load of white crystals in a bottle labeled clearly it is full of industrial chemicals. Anyone that stupid, doesn't deserve to live. So it isn't hazmat fees, ammonium formate isn't super-toxic, super-reactive, doesn't behave badly if it comes into contact with air or water. Only real other risk would be adding it to strong sulfuric acid, which would cause it to release carbon monoxide. Again, don't pour sulfuric acid over it, and the people transporting the shipment will be quite safe as long as they refrain from eating it.
Just fucking gouging, is what those bastards are doing. Taking nearly 50 USD for that to anyone desperate enough to buy it, it's bloody robbery, and on false pretences too.
Wouldn't people agree, that charging more in shipping fees for an item, than it actually costs to ship it, is as good as fraudulent? people are already paying over the fucking odds, massively so, for the item itself, so why the hell should someone pay money for shipping that instead of being spent by the seller on getting the item from their stock, to the recipient, is disappearing into their wallet and being spent on themselves?
Fuckin' bastards. Makes me really want to set the little shits on fire every time I see them up to crap like that.
If a reasonable, hard working seller who wants to get business, based in china, poland, russia, lithuania, albania and the likes can manage to offer free shipping for a kilo of a product, then why can't the US sellers, even if they are unwilling to absorb the cost of shipping, manage to do so for the price it actually costs to send the item?
Taking vastly more is just underhanded theft on the part of lying little cunts.
