Short Work Update
Work continues to be uniformly awesome. This week I'm on the evening shift (4 PM-midnight), which isn't too bad so far. I seem to be able to stay awake better than during the day, oddly (I generally get drowsy in the early afternoon, after lunch), and as the off-shifts are quieter and less hectic, there's more time to do all kinds of interesting training. Last night, for instance, I spent a few hours driving a little electric golf cart all around the four-mile tunnels of the Tevatron, the main particle collider machine here and the largest in the world next to the LHC. My coworkers and I looked at beamline and superconducting magnets and cryogenic systems and instrumentation and radiation shielding and fans and super-high-voltage power supplies. We also looked at rather interesting graffiti (a drawing of a naked person with both boobs and a penis next to a dog? what?) and found another golf cart which had an ice cream truck sound system installed (well, installed with duct tape) on it, so that it played jolly tunes when you drove it around. It's fun here.
We're in shutdown mode, which is a yearly turn-off-everything-and-do-maintenance time. It's much like Reactor Paideia, except that we run 24/7 the rest of the time so this is a much bigger deal, and everything is orders of magnitude more dangerous and organized accordingly. Among the safety systems are lockout-tagout boxes, where the main keys used to turn everything on are removed and locked inside clear boxes which each individual person going inside the tunnels puts their individual lock (with their engraved serial number and picture tag) onto and keeps the key on their person, so that the machine can't possibly be turned on until you come back. There are also keys you take with you when you go into the tunnels which the machine can't run without, and locks put on power supplies and circuit breakers. There are all kinds of redundancies-upon-redundancies safety systems all designed to keep us safe, because the hazards are real and serious. Still, we get tons of training and it's all taken very seriously, which I'm glad of.
My training progresses apace. It's terribly interesting learning about all this stuff--high-energy physics, machine technician work, beam optics, computer programming, radiation safety, electrical engineering, fixing and problem-solving. Everyone's been as eager to train me as I am to learn, so I have a great time pretty much every shift. I do a fair amount of studying on my own, too, so I'm pretty much in academic-active-technical nerdery geekery bliss.
A proposal: I find the best way to learn is to try to explain it to others. Would anyone be interested in taking "lessons," such as I can give them? Ideally, I'd like to have a list of interested persons available for informal phone calls and e-mails and blog posts, so that when I'm trying to learn something, you can learn it too. When I have time and inclination, I'll try giving some of you a ring and teaching you about something I'm trying to get the hang of. You can challenge me to learn it better, and maybe get something out of what I say. I do so love to teach, and believe in the sharing of knowledge and vanquishing of ignorance. And hot dang, antimatter, yo!
I'd like to write more, but it's actually almost time to go off to work. More later, my darlings. <3
We're in shutdown mode, which is a yearly turn-off-everything-and-do-maintenance time. It's much like Reactor Paideia, except that we run 24/7 the rest of the time so this is a much bigger deal, and everything is orders of magnitude more dangerous and organized accordingly. Among the safety systems are lockout-tagout boxes, where the main keys used to turn everything on are removed and locked inside clear boxes which each individual person going inside the tunnels puts their individual lock (with their engraved serial number and picture tag) onto and keeps the key on their person, so that the machine can't possibly be turned on until you come back. There are also keys you take with you when you go into the tunnels which the machine can't run without, and locks put on power supplies and circuit breakers. There are all kinds of redundancies-upon-redundancies safety systems all designed to keep us safe, because the hazards are real and serious. Still, we get tons of training and it's all taken very seriously, which I'm glad of.
My training progresses apace. It's terribly interesting learning about all this stuff--high-energy physics, machine technician work, beam optics, computer programming, radiation safety, electrical engineering, fixing and problem-solving. Everyone's been as eager to train me as I am to learn, so I have a great time pretty much every shift. I do a fair amount of studying on my own, too, so I'm pretty much in academic-active-technical nerdery geekery bliss.
A proposal: I find the best way to learn is to try to explain it to others. Would anyone be interested in taking "lessons," such as I can give them? Ideally, I'd like to have a list of interested persons available for informal phone calls and e-mails and blog posts, so that when I'm trying to learn something, you can learn it too. When I have time and inclination, I'll try giving some of you a ring and teaching you about something I'm trying to get the hang of. You can challenge me to learn it better, and maybe get something out of what I say. I do so love to teach, and believe in the sharing of knowledge and vanquishing of ignorance. And hot dang, antimatter, yo!
I'd like to write more, but it's actually almost time to go off to work. More later, my darlings. <3