Poor her? not at all! she's lucky, a lucky, lucky wee lil bugger!
She has the PR!
To me, that'd make up for the shittiest jobs in the world, coming to homes having to carry a concealed pair of silenced pistols and a long dagger in a wrist-sheath, if I had to do that day in, day out, but knew that once a month, I'd be honoured by the PR allowing me to speak her name, hear her voice, that would make up for it all.
Currently I'm thinking 'SQUEEEEBBLLLEESSS!!!'
My old man just brought in a big cardboard box, well wrapped, for me. The 5 liter jug of 99.95% purity methylene chloride I ordered on, IIRC, friday. SQUEEBLESSQUEEBLESSQUEEBLES!
I was running SO low on dichlor, that the tiny bit left in the last lot I bought, a 10 liter jug, of DCM, there was so little left, that I could pour the remainder into the headspace of the new bottle, and just keep the empty bottle as a solvent resistant bottle for keeping waste solvent after I assign a specific type of waste solvent to it, label as such, for redistillation. That way I don't take up space in the fridge with two big cans but one with no more than a small beaker full. few hundred ml at most. I was gasping for more dichlor, really, really gasping for a refill.
Old man brought in the package and said 'this sounds like it has liquid in it, it's probably yours'
Slit it open, very carefully, and it wasn't quite what I expected, it was the DCM. I'm expecting another package, which is why, containing 3x1 liter bottles of high-concentration (85%) HCOOH (formic acid)
Could have gotten 95%, but more expensive for 500ml when ripoff shipping is included, because they were fucking american sellers.
I HATE american ebay chemical merchants. They make more money in the shipping fees they rip people off for than they charge for their items. Dirty skeezy fucknumpties.
Shit, I've often thought of listing say, 10 and 20, 25, 50g pots of reagent grade red phosphorus, as it's DAMN hard to get in the US, because it's used by a few people with not enough sense to make P2P and use reductive amination, maybe even form an imine and catalytically hydrogenate the imine to reduce it to the amine, in an enantioselective process using a chiral ruthenium catalyst, so no isomer resolution and 50% waste for each cycle taking the laevo-(meth/ethyl)amphetamine crud back to phenylacetone.
And sell them the phosphorus in tiny little packets, charging 50 quid for 10g or something horrid like that, just to get payback, selling ONLY to america. (My phosphorus would be genuine of course, mine is good stuff, got it in a 2 kilogram lot, from a contact who has a contact who can purchase from Sigma-Aldrich; they can get nigh anything, but to us plebs, they wouldn't deign to so much as sell us a drop of their janitor's cat's latest dead mouse's dying squirt of piss for a grand plus half a K shipping.
Hell they'd not even answer emails unless it was to set up an acct, and that only until they realize 'no official affiliation', at which point they'd drop us as if we were white-hot dog turd chunks.
But, I've connections, and as such, 2kg (minus what I've used already) of the best red phossy going
Old man brought my package, but it was the 5l dichlor I ordered, still waiting for 3 liters of 85% formic acid and 250g ammonium formate. Which in the first case free shipping, the formic i mean, coming from the UK, as did the DCM, the 250g am.formate, that is courtesy of IIRC, lithuania. Love dealing with russkis, polish and lithuanians, they give what they claim to give and they can ship for nowt, at least on my end.
Can't wait for that ammonium formate to get here, I've got something I've been wanting to try with it for ages, a zinc dust-ammonium formate mediated catalytic transfer hydrogenation type reduction, no Raney nickel, no cobalt boride, no nickel boride, no copper boride even, and certainly no platinum group metalorganics which either are horribly expensive, needing every, single,fucking, microgram recovering, for reuse, right down to the last speck, under a magnifying glass.
One I looked at for something once, to use in combination with IIRC triphenylsilane, Sigma would have charged me over a pound a milligram of catalyst! and their phenylsilane was so awfully pricy that I couldn't afford to do it, I'll have to buy basic, cheap (as they can be had at all) salts of the platinum group metal, iridium IIRC, one of the cheaper ones, or even iridium metal dust and attack it using molten potassium or sodium cyanide to form a hexacyanoiridate, and proceed from there, make it into an iridium oxide, form a halide with say, either bromine, or insert into an inert tube and use chlorine gas at as close to 1000 'C as I can get it, to flow over the iridium as fine, fine dust, as iridium whilst a Pt group metal is one of the cheaper ones, almost no jewelers use. I'm sure I have the phenylsilane procedure and iridium catalyst noted down in one or other of my laboratory notebooks.
(I've got several. I've had enough hard drive failures in my lifetime not to trust them that much. I'd HATE to lose my whole life's most interesting work, the accounts thereof in detail, albeit cryptic, so only I know what certain things such as 'substrate was added' actually MEAN, I.e just WHAT that substrate actually is. So I keep my lab books on paper, although I ought to copy them to computer as a backup.)
But I LIKE having my lab notes in actual books, books one can pick up, hold in the hand and flick through until finding just what I want, and being able to take them to environments a computer air intake would be harmed by. AFAIK they'd not like things like iodine monochloride or bromine vapour, chlorine gas, nitric acid fumes, mercury vapour, cyanides, azides...I doubt the innards of a laptop would appreciate having the gold stripped off the processor contacts by mercury vapours!
So its nice, just being able to pick up a paper book I KNOW cannot crash, lest I myself accidentally drop it into a vat of corrosives or oxidizers. Or hear the filth try entering, hear the words 'search warrant' and quickly pour out a tray of sulfuric acid, 98-99% concentration, and just drop the notebooks in, knowing no forensic team in the world would be able to recover them.
And hopefully some ignorant fucking swine would put themselves in hospital with worse-than-third-degree depth burns, searing and smoking, where what used to be pork, first became roast pork, then pork scratchings, then a mere lump of H2SO4-impregnated, smoking, acid spitting, SO2-emitting charcoal.
