Hello fellow Senior Chemists! I work at GFS Chemicals, managing Customer Service and Sales teams in our Call Center. We're a small, family-owned chemical manufacturer based in central Ohio. As a chemist, I provide technical support for our products, discussing subjects like purity, particle size, solubility and concentrations, etc.
But some customers want more than that. They want to know, "will this work for my application?" I can't advise them on their processes or applications. Even if it's an application that I happen to know about, I can only discuss our products and their features, because we can't accept the liability of "she told me to do it!"
I'm curious: how many Senior Chemists work as Consultants in one way or another? How many of you share your expertise for fun or profit?
There are many unschooled amateur chemists afoot. For example, we get requests for conc HNO3 regularly from gold miners. Some of them live in Colorado or Alaska, but most are right next door in Everytown, America. The new gold mines are PC boards and they are everywhere. I always ask, "how did you hear about GFS?" and they say either Google or YouTube. There are very many YouTube videos on extracting and purifying gold from PC boards.
Another recent question: how does KMnO4 work to detect the presence of H2S in our field operations? What? I have no idea. Sorry, I can't advise you on that.
I would love to be able to send customers to a website for help. Not YouTube or Google or Wikipedia, but a forum of experienced chemists.
What is Your Opinion?
thank you!
Kelly
