Lousy Day

I just should have stayed in bed this morning.

I got to work early this morning because I needed to get some reagents prepared for the day. My hope was to be a little ahead of the game at the end of the day. The reality was that I wound up a day behind, with nothing to show for my efforts.

Sadly this isn't too outside of the norm for science. Sometimes procedures that have worked flawlessly ninety-nine times in a row will fail when you try to perform them the hundredth time. They might fail because a reagent has gone bad, or because a piece of equipment malfunctions, or because of something I like to call G.T.I. (Gross Technical Incompetence), which explains a myriad of experimental failures.

Today, it seems as though every experiment was in its hundredth-round failure cycle. By the end of the day, I was dropping pipet tips on the floor and spilling solutions all over my bench. After ten hours of banging my head against the metaphorical wall, I gave up and went home.

It's days like this that I wonder why I became a scientist. Fortunately there are also good days, when experiments work and I can put another piece into the jigsaw puzzle that is my project. Of course, I think the ratio is about 15:1 in favor of the bad days.

The nice thing about bad days is that, like all other days, they end. Today will be over soon and, in the immortal words of Scarlet O'Hara, tomorrow is another day.