Interesting Vendor Mail
It seems that VWR and I have very different opinions as to what constitutes “IMPORTANT Information”:
A dinosaur squishy toy attached to a 15%-off coupon for a new balance only musters an 8.2 out of 10 on my scale of importance, but thanks for writing.
August 24th, 2012 at 8:32 PM
You can thank me for the free, cheap toy!
August 24th, 2012 at 9:14 PM
You can have all of our jobs, so long as we can have all of your squishy toys. Thanks!
August 25th, 2012 at 7:31 AM
Important mail = important for ME. You don’t matter other than as a source of cash.
Bad news, China – Vietnam and Burma are going to take your squishy toy jobs, and Tajikistan’s next.
August 26th, 2012 at 10:44 AM
A stress dino… I think the most effective one was a stress toy in the shape of my grad school’s mascot. A prof there won some start-up money or some business competition for a new polymer idea, and they had a small party where they gave out these stress toys (that were not surprisingly not made with this prof’s new polymers). I think they were really not aware of the amount of hate that graduate students can develop for their alma mater, and the squishy stress things disappeared after five minutes. I know I was squeezing mine in irritation still one year after finishing grad school. Now it just sits there on the shelf though.
Or maybe they were aware and decided to mediate the fallout in just this way. One of my friends, who had a very successful doctorate, said that when he’s driving away to his post-doc, he’s going to fire a grenade launcher at the chemistry building and never look back, hitting the pedal and laughing all the way to his new city. I think he decided to settle for the squishy toy instead.
August 27th, 2012 at 4:42 AM
Paul,
You’ll feel differently when Katy Perry sees it while touring your lab and says “Oh, how cute!”
August 27th, 2012 at 12:02 PM
Hey! Is that a space dino?? Quick, someone figure out what the chirality of its DNA is!!