Failure

So, with my reactions working (at least somewhat a couple milligrams is good news here) I have not had much bad news, but this week I did. My first couple of reactions were pretty much guaranteed to work, this latest reaction has caused many of the grad students to fail. Two different grad students worked on this reaction at least one month and every single time they were met with failure. To further my research I must make benz-cat, but to make benz-cat we need to use this reaction that has never worked. So, what I am making is called 1,2 benzenedithiol. It is a three day reaction (and we ordered new chemicals for it so that everything would be fresh). This week we were able to run NMR on our oil and we discovered that we made something that most certainly is not 1,2 benzendithiol but something that has way too many hydrogens.
Because of this failure, I distilled the only non-fresh chemical (TMEDA) on Wednesday. This proccess would have worked better but someone kept turning our reaction off so it took longer. Next week on Monday I will be working up the 1,2 benzendithiol that I started reacting on Wednesday.
This week, the machines we normally use (such as the NMR) were completely having problems. The normal NMR I use is booked until Saturday, so we decided to use the 250 megahertz NMR, but it was being filled with helium. So we had to wait until it was done being filled. We came back and the shims were completely horrible. They wouldn't even lock onto our compound so we had to go get the tech guys. They had to play with it for forty minutes. It was kinda funny.