This is a summary of how these things usually go.

The technician arrives at his desk at 9am having been told during the previous work day (so, friday in this case) that an experiment for a military-funded project would be conducted this week. Someone in another state with no access to the technician’s schedule made this decision, and, as it happens the experiment conflicts with another major experiment for another project (but not a government one) scheduled for the same day.

Schedules are shifted around and the technician starts setting up for the experiment. His supervisor, who is in another city at a meeting, has emailed him the written procedure for the experiment but she has not actually read it. The procedure was written by another scientist at another institution and passed onto her. It is very short and appears to have been hastily written.
The procedure calls for approximately 5 times as much work as was agreed upon the preceding week. The engineer in charge of the experiment’s primary equipment will have to arrive at work at 3am (instead of his usual 8am) Tuesday to complete the experimental treatment of the samples. (the conflicting experiment is also being run that day and he has to work on THAT from 8am until 3.)They have to be on a FedEx truck by 4pm that afternoon because the labs doing the actual analysis are in other states.

Because the experiment’s size was initially miscommunicated, the technician has to pull resources from other projects to get the samples packaged for treatment (they’re food samples.) None of the necessary equipment for preparation of the samples is hooked up or working and has to be quickly moved and tested to make sure it’s all working properly. The written protocol (the one that got passed down without being reviewed or edited in any way) contains an obvious error. The scientist who wrote the protocol is not answering his phone or his email.

So in the end the experiment was set up exactly according to the written instructions. If the error is, indeed, an error, then everything will have to be redone in a week and over $2000 worth of materials and man-hours will have been wasted.