Weird Emails: The Chemicals
I get a lot of WTF stuff.
I am unsure how I got on this mailing list, but usually once a week, I get an email from Carter Chemicals. Apparently they are brokers who buy surplus, and re-sell it on the spot market.
Anyway, here is a typical offer:
The email is pretty plain, nothing exciting or special. No bells or whistles. A list of products and quantities.
Today we see that they have about 600K gallons of Dowtherm A. Dowtherm is a heat transfer fluid. That means it is something that you use in a heat exchanger (like a refrigeration or power generation system).
Past editions had on offer up to 1.5M pounds of Titanium Dioxide (that is the pigment that makes paint “white”1), or resin bases for common plastic part manufacture.
How did I get on this list? I have no idea. I have never been a user of industrial chemicals. I did work for a company that made instruments for industrial measurement and test, but it wasn’t at all related to chemical or material analysis.
In the way back I was an analytical chemist, but that was circa 1996.
No, I suspect that this was leakage of my email from LinkedIn2 and that really pisses me off. I have to about once a quarter go into their settings and turn off the “new” notifications that they want to send emails on (because, I turned them all off, and suddenly they expand the notifications, opting me in automatically. Those fuckers) and that leads to many WTF moments, and then diving into the cryptic fucking settings to turn that shit off.
It gets old, but, I will keep on this alias, because I enjoy reading about all the chemicals I could be buying.
Fun fact: Before TiO2 became widely available, Lead Oxide was used to make paint white. Not so good for kids or other environmental exposure. I am full of fun facts like this.
Oh, how I fucking hate the scummy practices of LinkedIn. And MSFT buying them didn’t make it any better.
Pretty sure lead oxide was used in makeup back in the 18th century too. No wonder so many in the nobility were off their nut.