Chemistry Blues

This post is dedicated to all those who doing research, especially chemistry, and especially if you answer an unfortunate or sheepish 'yes' to any of these:

• Ever tried to remove DMF by washing with water, but that last bit just wouldn't go away?
• Ever tried to re-dissolve something in the solvent you'd extracted with and not have anything go in? Did you then wonder where all your product went, extract the aqueous layer with a different solvent and get crap?
• Ever dissolve your compound in one solvent and obtain a yellow oil, but get some purple liquid with another? Repeatedly?
• Ever run one of those columns where all 7 spots come out in the same tube?
• OR nothing came out at all?
• Ever get those inexplicable singlets in your NMR that integrate to almost 1 but are definitely not what you put in or a common solvent impurity?
• Ever had a column blow up when you gently pressurized it with N2? Was it loud?
• Ever had one of those mixtures that no solvent system would resolve? Ever decided to just wing it then and go for 10% EA/hexanes and collect teenie fractions?
• Ever run a perfectly-packed column and get shitty separation, only to see your neighbor's TLC plates with nice single spots in a row despite a nasty cracked column?
• Ever run TLC and get one spot, only to run prep TLC and get 7 bands?
• Ever sneezed and knocked over your product flask?
• Ever transferred your over-night reaction mixture to the separatory funnel, only to be informed by the gushing liquid and growing splotch on the fume-hood floor that you forgot to close the stopcock?
• Ever filtered something and got a suspension?

...

Ever feel the overwhelming urge to put together such a list of your own after insurmountable frustration?

Cheers! Hang in there, tomorrow will be better. Otherwise scrap that reaction. Better living through chemistry :D