Trouble struck at 8:16 p.m. on January 28.

I checked the progress of the mass spectrometry analysis on TeamViewer and saw that the blank that had just finished running had the weirdest looking raw data.

Cue the horrible iPhone photos used in text conversations induced with slight panic

For reference, the previous blanks looked like this:

I checked the previous sample, just to make sure nothing went wrong. It looked fine!

The pressure also looked fine.

So I checked the current sample that was running, and it was also doing something wonky in the midst of data collection.

I talked with Emma and she agreed to check the progress in about 45 minutes in case things had changed.

45 minutes later…

The data collection seemed to be going smoothly, so I agreed to check the sample when it was done. If the blank that runs after that sample looked weird, or if the sample looked weird, then I would clear the active queue and stop running the samples.

1 hour later…

When I checked the sample again, data was collected, but it didn’t seem to fully collect in the left tail of the distribution. Emma believes that there was a bubble in the column, so I will run this sample again.

The current blank also seemed like it would follow the pattern of previous blanks, so all is good!

The next morning…

Laura and I added 60 µL of ACN to the blank tube just in case. Everything ran smoothly overnight, so fingers crossed there are no more bubbles in the column!