BD....bite me!

I seem to have a lot of trouble with big scientific supply companies these days.

Today it's BD (Becton Dickson). They started out as the cytometry "gold standard" by having great flow cytometers. But selling half a million dollar machines wasn't enough. So they started buying out scientific suppliers.

The gold standard in centrifuge tubes, Falcon, was bought out by BD. Now, approximately 5% of the tubes are cracked.

Then they bought out Pharmingen, the gold standard in antibody suppliers. If Pharmingen didn't sell it, you most likely couldn't find it. Haven't seen a quality issue yet with their products.

But because of someone dropping the ball, I'm stuck waiting for a FedEx Saturday delivery because these items are needed on Monday. I have a confirmation number, but no tracking number.

Naturally, their phone trees give me messages "we're only open Monday through Friday - go away". So I pretend I'm dumb and clueless, and wait for the system to try and kick me to a real person.

They have an annoying hold thing going on. The music fades in and out. And you're periodically reminded in a loud voice how many are in the queue before you. It's been telling me since I got on that there's one in front of me.

At this rate, I'll take a janitor that can access a computer.