This post may not be fully intelligible to all of you, as it contains references to biological reagents and scientific protocols that I use in lab, but the main message should be clear. Correction: I will make the main message perfectly clear right now from the start:
SOME PEOPLE JUST CAN'T DO THEIR JOB.
I needed to order some very short very specific sequences of DNA for a procedure called PCR. (PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction and is a method of amplifying specific sequences of DNA from cells or tissue. You can produce millions of copies of one gene, or part of one gene, for use in other procedures. One reagent necessary for PCR is oligonucleotide primers, the very short very specific sequences of DNA that I needed to order. Still with me? It doesn't matter; read on.) We order our primers from a company called Invitrogen, which rocks. However, their online ordering procedure for custom primers (meaning you get to choose the exact DNA sequence) doesn't rock.
Invitrogen allows you to request a confirmation email of your order be sent to you. This is good. However, the confirmation email does not include the sequences of the primers you ordered. This isn't so good. Imagine that you went online and ordered a custom t-shirt that has a bunch of numbers on it. Let's say these numbers are your birthdate, your age, your anniversary, etc. The t-shirt company sends you an email saying, "Hey, we got your order" but does not confirm what the string of numbers to be printed on the t-shirt is. Essentially, they haven't acknowledged what it is that you exactly ordered, which could be a pain if they screwed up your t-shirt (e.g., changed your birthday by accident) and you have no proof that you ordered something different.
Invitrogen claims that they do not email sequences to you in the confirmation email because "email is an insecure form of communication, and we do not want to be responsible if your competitors hijack/intercept/decrypt your email and steal your primer sequences". (That's not a direct quote, but a paraphrase.) This is absurd for two reasons: 1) What university doesn't force secure email upon it's employees/students? and 2) I don't think any scientist in the history of science has been so desperate to obtain something so trivial as primer sequences by way of something as technically difficult (for biological researchers, that is) as intercepting and decrypting email. Heck, the US government can't crack 128-bit encrypted messages (so they claim; conspiracy theorists don your tinfoil hats and refute me), nevermind some 70-year old tenured professor who can barely email and word process his grants and papers.
My advisor has called Invitrogen more than once to complain about this, and the idiocy of their policy. He was told to request that the sequences be sent in the confirmation email by typing so in the "comments" box on the order form. It often is ineffective: they don't email you your sequences.
One day he called Invitrogen to complain yet again and they gave him their absurd reason why they don't email the sequences to you. He said, "Then why don't you have a little box that you can just check on the order form so that you can risk having the sequences intercepted?" The Invitrogen representative's response was the standard "We don't have that feature on our order form, but if you request that the sequences in the 'comments' box we will make sure they are included in the confirmation email." My advisor then asked, "What do you do to make that happen on your end? Do you just check off a little box on your computer when you review my order?" The answer: "Yes."
Frustrating, no?
So when I ordered 40+ primers the other day I wrote in the comments box: "Please check the little box to send my sequences to me in the confirmation email." It worked. My labmate ordered some primers the other day and simply wrote: "Please send the sequences in the confirmation email." No luck. Apparently you have to let them know that you know that they only have to check a box, a task that they are often incapable of performing.
Some people just can't do their job.
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3 comments:
I'm surprised the confirmation email isn't totally automated. Seriously, any internet purchase in this day and age should have minimal human-in-the-loop requirements, let alone some dumb ass checking each one, and optionally checking a little box, BEFORE you get a confirmation. Hopefully someone in their security department was like, "Whoa, how do they know we have a checkbox to do that?"
actually jay, you raise a good point i forgot to mention. invitrogen's whole order system is fully automated, as you would expect.
normally, when you place an order for primers, the sequences you submit are sent directly to the machine that synthesizes them, and the proper labels for the tubes (which have your name, the primer name that you choose, and the primer sequence) are printed up and probably affixed to the tube of primers automatically as well. no human interaction until it comes to shipping perhaps.
however, if you enter anything in the comments box of the order form, your order is delayed anywhere from a few hours up to one day because a customer service representative has to read the comments and act on them. this means that half the time these reps read the comments box and ignore the request to include the sequences in the confirmation email, which only requires them to click a box on screen.
so they go through the trouble to read your comments, yet don't spend 2 seconds clicking a box? amazing, huh?
I started out reading this post with every intention to get through it. But I've been reading all day. I zonked out early on. I will endevour to reread tomorrow!
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