Thank you for all of your suggestions. I think I'll have to see if I can borrow the chemicals that I require if they don't turn up in the next few days.

I would have planned around it if I could have. We have managed to set up purchase order accounts with the companies we use a lot to order our lab essentials, which largely by-passes most of the problems. However if a company is new or rarely used by us (as the company that I have ordered from is), this is not possible and the order has to go through the ordering offices which takes weeks. Admittedly if I'd realised that I needed the goods that I do at an earlier stage then I would have ordered them weeks ago, but unfortunately I only realised that they were needed in the last week or so.

The funding for my PhD ends in three months time and I am aiming to have completed all of my lab work by then. However my university is making this extremely difficult for me as whenever I order any of the lab equipment or chemicals that I need for my lab work it takes weeks for the orders to be processed and to arrive. I am currently stuck and can't do any lab work as I have been waiting for some essential chemicals to arrive for nearly a fortnight now. I have tried focusing on my writing but feel frustrated about my lack of progress with my lab work, especially given the shrinking amount of time that I have left. I have been told that the office that deals with the orders is currently short-staffed but this seems to have been a recurring problem all the way through my PhD. :-s