Crashing head-long into vacation

I need the up-coming vacation. We have had what I like to refer to as a "shit-streak" in the lab as of late. Nothing seems to work and on the off chance that something does, the product is lost in the next step. All of that was highlighted today when I tried to run something just before the break to figure out why the experiment from yesterday did not work. The only explanation I can come up with is degradation of the starting material from the sample so that nothing appears after an experiment. I set out to test this and found something I didn't expect - not only is the material not degraded, it's not even there. When I set out to visualized degraded material, I see absolutely nothing, just like when I had tried to visualize intact material. So, that means that I never got anything out of my starting sample, despite doing everything I have done in the past, and more, to produce intact material. There is no conceivable way to me that nothing would show up under either condition, but yet.... I have no idea what this means or what to do differently that would produce a different result that would still be useable. I am not sure which is more annoying right now, being ignored by a colleague who can help me or being taunted by my samples. Right now I think it's a tie. In any case, I'm going to spend the next few days on a tropical island, I'm not bringing any work and I'm not going to think about any of this. Happy Thanksgiving and safe travels.