End of Run

It's only few minutes to go, then my last shift for the collaboration will be over. I have done these chores for few years now and sitting here never was pleasant. It's a mind numbingly boring work and often I was quite angry about how stupid things were done. But on the other hand, the environment at a big facility like ours here is actually quite fascinating. I always admired the mixture between a industrial plant and a hobbyists lab, combining professionally built high-power machinery with duct-tape and a web of uninsulated cables dangling from racks with measurement electronics. If you walk around, late in the evening, you can see huge halls with impressive construction with single scientists working on their own duct-tape-held experiment, immersed in their research. And sometimes I contemplate that this deeply focused work is what I could have done, and might even have enjoyed had I decided to move here some time ago, and not only do shifts few times a year. But now I realized that I might have built what I critizied when on shift: A faulty device, built under time-pressure by a layman, that no one but him could ever operate. It's probably for the best that it will be shut down in few months, so that everyone can built a new gadget, at a new facility somewhere else.