Christmas with a detector

I have written earlier about taking shifts and watching the detector. It's usually not an enormous amount of work, but I was still happy that someone else volunteered to take care of i over Christmas this year. I was only appointed as stand-in "run coordinator", which means that I'm responsible for planning and administration of the shifts but in ideal cases should not have to do much at all.

Unfortunately it also means that I'm in a responsible position and the first person to be contacted if something should go wrong. Which it did. On Christmas day we lost connection to one computer in the lab, and could not get all information about the status of the detector. I spent hours and hours trying to figure out first how to deal with the lost connection and then how to make sure that the detector is stable and in a state which will not harm it until someone can get to the lab. I didn't lose any sleep really, but I missed parts of Christmas.

Good that my family is patient, and that we didn't have any elaborate plans.

This is what it's like to be a scientist, sometimes. Even for someone so far from workaholic as me.