Fifteen times without a hitch, and then this
Over the past few years I have used the same courier company to transport biological samples between my lab and the Earlham Institute in Norwich. Sixteen trips in total. Fifteen of them went without a hitch. Mostly, at least. All processed smoothly through the university's normal procurement system, with a purchase order number attached, as the world apparently requires.
The exception
The sixteenth job was different. For the first time, I was paying out of my own pocket rather than through university funds – a detail I made explicit when booking. No PO, I explained. Could we arrange BACS payment instead? No problem at all, came the reply. The price was confirmed, bank details would follow, a BACS transfer would be perfectly fine.
Collection went smoothly. The driver arrived, communicated clearly, collected the parcel without fuss. This was not the first time I had been impressed by the people on the operational side. On a previous occasion, a driver had to wait because a parcel was not fully labelled – I had been delayed behind a road accident and arrived late. Rather than leaving, the driver went off to do another job and came back. Small thing, perhaps, but not the behaviour of a company that does not care.
Stranded
So the samples were collected, the delivery was scheduled, and then – then I got an email from Earlham Institute: where are the samples? Nothing was delivered so far.
I contacted the courier via email, stating that nothing had been delivered so far. Whether I could get an update on the shipment, please. As it turns out the delivery window had been set for 8 pm on a Friday evening, by which point the institute would have been closed. There was the fear that my precious biological samples would spend the weekend in limbo.
A phone call nobody asked for
What happened next, however, was rather telling. Without any direct prompting from me, the courier company rang Earlham Institute directly to ask how the samples should be stored over the weekend. They had made a mess of the delivery, but someone picked up the phone and tried to do the right thing. The samples were kept in appropriate conditions and delivered on the Monday. The situation was rescued, even if it should not have needed rescuing in the first place.
The administrative spiral
Then, weeks later, an email arrived asking for a PO number. I explained again – as I had at the point of booking – that I had no university funds for this job, that a PO was not something I could provide and that this was why we had agreed on BACS in the first place. An invoice with bank details was duly sent. I transferred the money and confirmed by email that payment had been made, all on the same day.
The next message I received was not a confirmation of payment. No, it was a message asking me for a PO. You see, their accounts team had been in touch with the university's finance department, who had explained that direct payment was not possible and that a PO must be raised.
© RudolphLAB, 2026
There is a certain Kafkaesque magnificence to this. At some point between my confirming payment and their reading the email, someone had decided to contact the university about an arrangement that had nothing to do with the university, had never involved the university and had been specifically set up to circumvent the university's procurement system for the very reason that I was not using university money. The university's finance team, quite reasonably, had no idea what any of this was about and confirmed their standard policy: PO only.
An honest apology
The managing director eventually wrote to explain what had happened. The office manager had approved BACS payments for several customers without checking whether the company's systems could actually handle them. Jobs had ended up duplicated across two platforms, with missing information, no clear record of what had been paid and nobody quite sure of the state of any of it. It was, she said, a mess of their own making, and she was sorry.
It is hard not to admire that email. It was honest, specific and took full responsibility. The job was cancelled on their end, the payment confirmed, the matter closed. At least until the next email arrives, asking me for a PO.
The lesson
The lesson, if there is one, is familiar to anyone who works in an institution: individual people can be excellent – patient, proactive, genuinely trying – while the systems around them quietly unravel. The driver who waited. The person who rang Norwich about sample storage. The MD who wrote a clear and dignified apology. All doing the right thing. And somewhere in the background, two databases disagreeing about whether a parcel had ever been paid for.
Oh, and since you ask: my samples turned out to be fine.
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