Fuck me. I love Fridays. I look forward to Fridays. Fridays are the best day of the work week. But not today. Today totally sucked ass. How is it possible for a day to go from a fabulous morning to an absolutely shitty, miserable, execrable afternoon?
Things started ok. Got a bunch of lectures and labs prepared for the coming weeks, had a great meeting with some of my undergrads, caught up with a supercool colleague I hadn’t seen all week, got some positive feedback from Dept Chair on some stuff I’m organizing, saw some awesome new data from the lab ... and then the shit hit the fan ... and then splattered far and wide.
The first indication that things were going badly was the news that someone from Big Money Program had ordered MY lab’s phone to be disconnected and that the lab peeps had only discovered it when they went to make a call. What the fucking fuck? Don’t know why the fuck Big Money Program thinks our phone is any of their goddamned business as the university pays for the costs associated with the line and the number we use has NEVER EVER been associated with Big Money Program.
Grrrr.
And then I was informed that Big Money Program wants me to teach for them in the fall semester as per a deal they had arranged with our previous Dean. Not sure how that’s going to work out because I’m already overcommitted in the fall with my own department. Dept Chair plans to kick some heads next week and get it sorted out.
Grrrr.
Oh, but then things got worse. Much, much worse.
The 6 month old computer in the lab that runs Big Essential Machine died. Just when Postdoc went to use it. And when Research Assistant was waiting to use it.
Fuck.
Our IT Guru drove down from the other campus, spent several hours shaking his head in amazement at the computer which he had in pieces by this time and after much tinkering finally pronounced that the hard drive was deader than dead.
FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.
Oh, but it gets even better than that. The hard drive is so fucking dead that it doesn’t look like any data can be recovered. The lab peeps had backed up a small amount of stuff on their desktop computers and we were only days away from having our new fancy schmancy backup server hooked up. Of all the motherfucking luck.
And then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, my iPhone died. I only charged the fucker last night and now it won’t hold a charge any longer than an hour. Shit.
And the only saving grace after all of that misery? I just had a fortune cookie message that says “you will soon have the opportunity to improve your finances.”
Hmmm ... hopefully that means my NIH grant will be funded.
I’m glad this goddamned day is over. I’m going to my happy place and plan to pretend that today never happened. And when I wake up, the data will all be on the computer, Big Money Program will have gone and fucked themselves, my iPhone will be working perfectly and my grant will be funded. And pigs will be flying past my bedroom window.
Gah
2 hours ago
Hear, hear. Fridays suck ass, especially this last one. Good to hear it's not a local phenomenon, or a conspiracy against me personally (although that hasn't been conclusively ruled out).
ReplyDeleteYuck, that's a bad day. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I got a fortune cookie on Thursday that said "You will have a nice life with your wife."
Haha, great. As if men and lesbians are the only people who ever eat fortune cookies.
Ohh, that sucks so much. I am especially sorry to hear about the data loss, since all the other stuff you can kind of wrangle around somehow... We almost had that happen on our LC/MS--its drive died but luckily we were able to get the data off it. Since then it's now someone's lab job to sync the current drive with the backup drive once a week (we don't make data fast enough to need to do it more than that at this point).
ReplyDeleteaww.. that sounds like quite a bad day. sorry about the data, if it is indeed lost. (You never know, maybe another computer tech can take a look at it, run somethings on over drive etc and then you have your data?)
ReplyDeleteI hope all will be solved soon and good and that you can recover a good weekend. My last week sucked too - and I am planning on a long hard workout today to blow my thoughts out. Especially since I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back asleep due to ponderings..... :(
1. It's expensive but there are companies that can recover the data from anything.
ReplyDelete2. If BMP wants you to teach a course for them, what will they give you to do it? (Cash/grad student/marker/membership etc.) They may be able to force you to show up in the classroom, but they can't force you to prepare.
:(:(:(:(
ReplyDeletePiT, a very good friend of mine has a data recovery business with a very good success rate. It's in Vancouver, but people ship him hard drives from all over North America. He also has a policy of no data, no fee... drop me a line if you're interested and I can give you his details. I'm sure there will also be very similar businesses in your town if you don't want to deal with the shipping.
ReplyDelete/advertising (no, I'm not on commission!)
Any chance you updated your iPhone to the latest firmware? Apparently it has a battery life bug...
ReplyDeleteWell, at least this was a funny post. I think we've all had days like this.
ReplyDeleteAll I can say is, at least now you and your trainees will have better habits about backing up your data. This only had to happen to me once (back in thesis lab) to make me paranoid enough to immediately transfer and back up every single scrap of data that I collect on someone else's computer or instrument.
I hope you can recover some of it with one of these magical data recovery gurus helping. I also really hope your chair does manage to kick some heads, because that's BS about making you teach something based on someone else's promising it- WTF? Is that even in your contract??
good luck. I hope you get your grant, too.