Last night I had one of those nights. There's always one data stack that just goes horribly wrong, and since all my data collection had been going so smoothly so far, I new the smack down was coming. A stack usually takes 6-7 hours to collect, and between finding carbon in my sample, setting up the stack, and beam downtime during reinjection of the x-ray ring, I usually only get to run two stacks a day (morning and night). However, I've been finding carbon quickly, so I've been able to run three stacks per day, which is totally awesome. However, yesterday when I was starting my midday stack, I estimated that I'd be here until 12-1AM. That was acceptable, I guess. It was 5PM, and my stack would finish at around 11:30PM. Then I could set up the overnight stack. I stayed for the 7PM reinjection. During this, the beam is turned off, but the computer nows that somehow and pauses the stack, then restarts it once the beam is on again. However, there is always a little sample drift, so I stuck around to make sure what I was looking at didn't drift off the screen. It didn't, so I went to eat dinner and take a nap. During my nap, a small thunderstorm came up, and during one lightning strike, the lights in the room flickered. "Oh shit!" I thought. A power surge like that at the synchrotron can really fuck things up. The electrons that create the x-ray beams are flying around in a tightly controlled circle, and if the current changes even a little in the bending magnets, electrons fly everywhere and the beam "dumps". Not to mention sensitive equipment that could get fried. Luckily, only the beam dumped, but they didn't get it back and operational for 2 hours, which now meant I'd be up until 3AM. Well, fine! Fuck! Whatever. I get the stack started again and go out in the lobby to take a nap. But then...only after all that...the server computer, the one controlling the microscope, crashes! And it happened just after I went to take a nap! So I was fucking sleeping, and wasting my own fucking time, while the microscope was frozen. Of course by now its after 1:30AM, so I couldn't call anyone to fix this for me, and I did something I wouldn't normally recommend doing...I started clicking things. Actually, I only clicked on the program that crashed and hoped that fixed everything. It seemed to work. I had to focus the microscope and set up the stack again, which took until 2:30AM. I decided to forget about trying to run a third stack. Fortunately, this stack ran to completion and finished about 4AM, when I was comfortably dreaming in bed.