What I check and write down when a parcel of peptides arrives

The courier usually rings at 11:40, exactly when my hands are full. I sign, take the box and, before anything else, look at the clock and write the time on a sticky note on the lid. The time the parcel reached me, not the time it was handed in at the gate. I learnt the difference one winter, when a box of lyophilised peptides spent three hours on the windowsill at reception, above the radiator, because “it was only a small package”.

Since then I have kept a receiving sheet. One page, always the same, which I fill in in the order things happen.

Before I cut the tape

I take three photos with my phone: the shipping label, the whole box and its sorriest corner. If the box is crushed, wet, or opened and taped shut again, I want that on record before I lay a hand on it. The photos go on the sheet under their numbers from the phone, otherwise a month from now I won’t know which box was which.

I also note something I always used to forget: how many days the parcel spent on the road. The dispatch date is on the label or in the courier’s message. How a parcel leaves the supplier is something I read up on beforehand, not afterwards, in their delivery terms, so I know what to expect when I lift the lid.

The ice tells part of the story

I open the box and put a hand on the ice packs, if there are any. I don’t have a temperature sensor in the parcel and I don’t pretend to. I write one of three words: hard, soft or warm. “Hard” means still frozen. “Soft” means half melted, cold to the touch. “Warm” needs no explanation and tends to travel with an email to the supplier.

This is the one place where I forbid myself any optimism. If the packs are warm or the box turned up wet, the vials go into a separate box marked “on hold” and stay out of the work until I have an answer in writing. It isn’t for me to decide, by eye, that “they’re probably fine”.

The vials, one at a time

I count them. It seems silly until the day you order five and find four. Then I look at each one: the cap is in place and the seal intact, the glass has no cracks, the label is legible. I also note what the contents look like, without interpreting it. A lyophilised cake can come away from the bottom in transit, or crumble, and I have no way of drawing conclusions about that by peering through glass. I write what I see: “compact”, “detached”, “powder on the wall”.

I photograph the label of every vial and put the vials in the cold straight away, in a temporary box that says “receiving”. The paperwork I finish from the photos. The vials don’t sit on the bench while I hunt for a pen that works.

The batch number, in three places

The batch number appears on the vial, on the certificate of analysis and, quite often, on the document that travels with the parcel. It has to be the same string of characters everywhere. I read it aloud, character by character, because zero and the letter O look alike on a small label, and the figure one does a very talented impression of a lower-case l.

I want the certificate for my batch, not a “representative” one. I look at the date of analysis, the method used and the purity reported, then save it as a PDF in a folder named after the batch. When the certificate is missing from the parcel, I ask for it the same day. By the next day I have forgotten.

The compound name goes on the sheet exactly as the supplier writes it. SELANK, for instance, stays SELANK, as on the label, not “selanc” and not some abbreviation of my own. A year from now, when someone searches the logbook, they will search for the name on the vial.

What stays in writing

By the end, the receiving sheet has seven lines filled in:

1. the date and time the parcel reached my hands, plus the dispatch date;
2. the condition of the box and of the ice packs, in one word, and the photo numbers;
3. the compound and how many vials came;
4. the batch number, copied from the vial;
5. whether I have the certificate of analysis for the batch and where I saved it;
6. where each vial lives: fridge or freezer, shelf, box, position;
7. my initials.

Line six is the one people skip. Between the fridge (2–8 °C) and the freezer (−20 °C) I choose by the storage conditions on the product’s data sheet, never out of habit, and I write the location only once the vial has actually got there. “I’ll put it away later” is how orphan vials turn up in the receiving box. I once found one four months old, with all its paperwork in order and no address at all.

The whole business takes about a quarter of an hour for an ordinary parcel. I skipped it just once, on a Friday at ten to five, meaning to write it up on Monday. On Monday I spent an entire morning piecing together, from emails and from memory, what had come, when and in what state, and in the space about the ice I wrote, honestly, “don’t know”. That line is still there, underlined in red. I look at it every time the courier rings at 11:40.