A way in which I prefer not to start the morning:

With an email from my advisor, who just gave a seminar about my current project at another university, saying roughly this: "Turns out someone else is doing almost the exact same thing we're doing. I don't know how far along their work is, but we need to get the paper out NOW."

I've been down this road before, and it was -- what's that word? -- un-fun.

Some days I hate academia.