With all the great things happening lately, I knew I was due for a shitty day.

This day is one of the shittiest. Of course it's a day when I have TEM. I stayed late at ASU yesterday to carbon coat my samples for today. Chert and the SiO substrate don't conduct electrons very well, so I get charging effects (very bad!) in the TEM if I don't have a carbon coat. The carbon coater seemed to work strangely yesterday, but I didn't think anything of it. But this morning I noticed some bad charging right away, so I took my sample out and quickly ran over to the sample prep lab to coat it again. I did it twice and didn't notice any difference in the sample. Usually, I run the evaporation at a medium level for one or two seconds, and that gives a light coating on my samples, just enough to get rid of charging but not affect any spectroscopy. This time I ran the evaporation on high for five seconds, twice. And I couldn't see any darkening of the glass slide, meaning my samples weren't coated. By now I'm getting pissed off because I'm wasting the TEM time that I've already paid for ($25/hour) and I can't get this goddamn carbon coater to work!

Then the shit hits the fan. I open everything up to set up for another evaporation (third time's a charm, right?) and I drop the bell jar. This is a heavy piece of glass, about 18" high with a 12" diameter, and it shatters. At that moment, the rest of my TEM session is wasted, I can't do any TEM for several weeks, and nobody else who has an insulating sample can do TEM for several weeks. Now everybody will be pissed at me and know me as the "doofus who broke the carbon coater". I'm fucking pissed at the carbon coater for not working like it should, and pissed at myself for doing such a dumb thing. The lab manager who helped me clean up the mess said he broke the bell jar 2 years ago by opening high vacuum valves in the wrong order, but I still wish it didn't happen to me.