late night collecting data

The field I'm in often requires some fairly late night stays at the synchrotron. Yesterday, however, we were doing a non standard measurement, and had to install a lot of new equipment. As a normal user, your nightmare is that you will make a mistake, cause any one of the moving parts on the experimental table to collide with another part, destroy a million dollar detector, and never be invited back. Well, we ended up colliding three parts of the setup due to their restricted spatial organization early in the day. Luckily, nothing was damaged, but it took us another few hours to re-align everything, and it was 5 PM before we could start data collection! We ended up collecting eighteen excellent datasets in a whirlwind of collection and processing. After we had disassembled everything and cleaned up, I biked home in a groggy half awake state. It turns out that there is no one on the road in Grenoble at that hour. The streets were completeley empty, and even the massive and always congested Place Dubedout was deserted, except for the birds, who were already awake and singing.