The most exciting thing I have ever received in the post

I am now officially, WILLINGLY, New England Biolabs‘ slave for life. They sent me a new researcher starter pack for freeee. It is so awesome that I just want to buy everything from them, whether I need it or not.

I got:

• Floatee (for incubating my Eppendorf tubes in a water bath)
• Very snazzy 1GB data stick on a string, so I can wear it around my neck like a pretty necklace.
• Eppendorf opener (pretty much the most useless bit of plastic in existence).
• Permanent marker to label my shizzle (I need to scrawl cryptic numbers and dates on bits of plastic on a daily basis).
• Sleek looking black pencil.
• Charts with the electrophoresis running patterns of various DNA and protein molecular weight ladders. To make things more exciting, they’re magnetic.
• Sample of DNA polymerase . Bit dubious as to whether this’ll actually work as it’s been in the post and is meant to be stored at -20degreesC.
• Massive academic year planner wall chart.
• Loads and loads of information on biochemical signalling pathways including a couple of wall charts. Insanely useful if I was actually in this area of research. I will hang the wall charts in my living room, just to irk my housemates.
• Thousands and thousands of leaflets about various NEB products.

And this is just SOME of it, sitting proudly on my desk:

The packs are all gone now, so I’m afraid YOU CAN’T HAVE ONE. I expect they’ll be doing the offer again next September though.

In addendum: I had some confusion with delivery of the pack (due to my ignorance of how the department mail works) and Ms NEB helper lady, Dawn, was very helpful. Talk about customer service, srsly.