Let me show you my lab...

Time for a sneek peak at the dark bowels of CERN here. Situated in the darkest depths of building 9, Meyrin site lie two dark and dusky rooms. Filled with cruel machinations and horrible lairs. They are, my office and the AB-ABP-HSL lab! Oh yeah, even the acronym leaves you... confused?

A momentary aside here. CERN loves acronyms. You name it, they've got it. Want to see the LHC? Well you can follow the beam from the H- IS, down LINAC2, up to the PSB, with splits to the PS and LEIR, PS leading to the SPS, which flings shit off to HI-ISOLDE, Gran Sasso, LEAR and the LHC. Around the LHC you have ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, LHCf and TOTEM. That not enough? You have you AB, ITC, HR and others. Within the AB you have ABP, PO, RF, ATB. CC3, HSL, BBQ. Enough acronyms to kill a buffalo, or just require a permenant glossary. All the funnier when you realise about 90% of the staff work in the AB group.

But anyway, office and lab. The office first. Now you'd imagine CERN, place of wonder and sparkly stuff, to be filled to the eye balls with shiney new equipment and futuristic layouts right? Well, for a part you'd be right. The areas which the general public might see are filled with space-age designs, extravagant chairs and quite few nice paintings. Likewise, the computer centre is very shiney (for anyone curious it houses the Tier 0 LHC grid), and sounds like a 747 due to all the cooling. The rest of us poor plebs are situated in the dark beating bowels of 60s' era offices and work desks. There's more muddy brown coloured desks in this place than the rest of the world combined.

To give you a quick overview, CERN is not a science lab. Its engineering works. The scientists rarely live here, the engineers that build the machines do. Its all practicality, big machines and loud tools here, with the occasional building given over to visiting scientists (fun fact, of CERN's ~ 3500 permanent staff, probably less than 200 are physicists per se, most build shit).

To this background, it adds its own oddities. For instance, the lab I was working in, normal dry lab, with racks, electrical meters, giant bog rolls, a palm tree (!). Don't believe me? Here *will* be a picture (blasted bluetooth connectivity).

Like I said, somewhat strange. Even better, when I did experiments I did it by propping this tiny thing on top of a toilet roll about 2 ft wide. Epic!

CERN, it is quite a silly place.