Acros starts 2007 off right (in my book, anyway)

Today, we received an order from Acros that a former postdoc in the group originally placed in 2004 or so. It was one of the lab's occasional multi-bottle orders of 2.5 M n-butyllithium (n-BuLi) in hexanes.
(We order multiple 100 mL bottles, though some of our postdocs come from labs where one of the group jobs was to dole out the new n-BuLi into special sealed bottles from its big container. When I first joined the group, we had some shared 800 mL bottles, but that started to get unwieldy as we got more people.)
Anyway, soon after we placed that 2004 Acros order, we received a backorder notice, and the notices kept coming for a good while. We talked to our university's Fisher customer service rep to get to the bottom of the problem, and I believe we were told that because 2.5 M n-BuLi was manufactured in Europe, there was some new regulation on the books that made it very difficult to ship overseas. We had no problem getting 1.6 M Acros n-BuLi (anybody recall whether the suppliers are different for the two different concentrations?) and those that wanted it ordered 2.5 M n-BuLi from Aldrich (who I believe uses FMC Lithium) as a supplier, so I guess that order was relegated to the back of our heads until now. I have no idea what changed. Maybe some new law took effect Jan 1st (or 3rd, because of Gerald Ford). (**updated that link**) Our Fisher rep is usually around on Thursdays, so maybe I'll run into him tomorrow and find out.
For a trip down memory lane, see this post at Tenderbutton for a high-yield primer on the many ways to use an Aldrich or Acros Sure-Seal. You all remember the password, don't you?