The other day, I was sitting in a French branch of an American fast-food chain (I’m sure you can guess which one) grabbing a quick lunch during shopping on a typically busy Saturday. I was waiting for my husband to return with a couple of sundaes for dessert, and I watched life’s little dramas from our little table going on around me. One little girl completely dumped a salad on the floor, her mother just looked back and sighed as the worried-looking girl was deciding what to do about the matter (it was left there, but the box was carried away, and it was cleaned up a few moments later by an employee). Another youngster followed his family into the restaurant, then promptly stood fixed and proceeded to start crying (perhaps it was too busy for him at 12:30 pm). The matter was resolved by one of the adults picking the child up and bringing him to their table.
The little dramas occur all the time here. While we rarely have any sort of tantrum (though at times I feel like it), sometimes we do stand or sit there wondering what we do now, curse a little, or just sit there, head in hands.
Mostly, these occur because we have forgot some vital step or value to enter, and we cannot figure out why its not working. Though we are getting closer to the 1-click configure, there is still some way to go.
Sometimes we’ve done something stupid. On the computer, I’ve pressed the wrong button and wiped out all my e-mail programs Inbox. Sheepishly, I had to ask our system manager to restore it if he could restore it. I only lost a few recent ones, luckily, I guess.
Or just plain bad luck. After hours of work, we finally start going, and the cooling fails. On Wednesday we had a brief, CERN site-wide, power outage. Then on my way to the experiment to turn things back on, I hit a curb with my car, the front tire went flat, so I changed the tire. After I got there, I found a board that blew its fuses, and spent hours trying to get something to configure, as the program kept crashing (with no useful information), and then I tried power-cycling one of the crates I was using. After that, it worked. At 7pm I was finally ready to go home.
A la prochaine
p.s. Sorry this is late! Family came to visit and I just lost track. Next week we have a period of running the detector, so there should be some new and interesting stuff going on!
