Quick! Look busy!

Imagine the following scenario: you, a hapless grad student, are given a small task by your advisor to learn how to read your experiments simulated data and make plots with it. Then your advisor leaves the country for a week and a half - and you promptly forget that she will be back in town for at least one day before going out of town again, so you don't get too panicky about the details of your assignment. Then, on the Friday before she returns you realize that you might be expected to have something to show for the week, so you decide to finally track down someone who can explain what you need to do. Once you have a script to crunch through the data and have compiled the necessary software it's 3:30pm. And then the data server crashes. "Great!" You think, "I'm going to have to do this over the weekend." Then when you wake up on Saturday morning, the data server is down *again.* You imagine how bad it will sound when you tell your advisor, "I'm sorry, I couldn't do what you asked me to do last week because the data warehouse went down on Friday and didn't come back all weekend." :-(

Shit.