Don’t call it a closure!
During the Laboratory’s annual closure, some members of the personnel joined their families, others seized the chance to travel the world. The Restaurants were closed, the corridors were dark and the heating was turned off in most of the buildings. However, a lot of people spent the Christmas break working on site and the Bulletin would like to dedicate this first article of the new year to them all!
In the CERN Control Centre (CCC), each shift had two people in position to guarantee regular 24/7 service and to intervene in case of need. Gildas Langlois and Rodolphe Maillet, CCC operators from the Beams Department, spent Christmas Eve there and celebrated it with a cake. “I volunteered to work during the holidays in order to allow colleagues to stay with their families,” says Maillet. On New Year’s Eve, it was Julien Pache and Jean-Michel Nonglaton’s turn to spend the night at work. They had a nice dinner with a CCC-made fondue and some dessert. “Anne-Laure Bourachot, a fire detection piquet whose husband was working in Access Control, and Guy Crockford, who was on the afternoon shift, joined us for the dinner,” says Pache.
For the Fire Brigade, nothing really changed but the workload. “We use this calmness to do some longer training sessions and some maintenance that we can’t normally do the rest of the year,” explains Stephane Wiand of the Fire Brigade. “According to tradition, to mark the festivities we decided some weeks in advance who was going to cook each day of the break so that we tasted specialities from the different countries of our colleagues.”
At Point 5, the giant CMS detector wasn’t left alone during the break - someone looked after it every day. “Before Christmas we always bring the detector to a safe state which allows us to keep it unattended for most of the day,” explains Wolfram Zeuner, CMS Deputy Technical Coordinator. “However, when it comes to safety, nothing replaces the human eye. For this reason, a team of two volunteers once a day walked all around for about an hour, passing several stations and writing a report of what they found. In case of problems, intervening quickly reduces the danger of severe damage.”
The ATLAS detector was safely locked up for the holidays but Denis Demazio, who takes care of the performance of some of the ATLAS trigger software, worked on site the first two days of the closure. “As the cafeteria was closed, one of the bigger problems was finding food, so I had to go to the petrol station outside CERN,” explains Damazio, a detour that led him past the Globe, where some disappointed tourists learned they would have to reschedule their trip to the Laboratory.
Obviously computers were not shut down during Christmas and a few people had to look after their performance. Mohammed Daoudi, System Administrator for the IT Department, is one of them. Luckily, the type of work allowed him to work from home. “I am part of a team of eight people, but only two of us were working during the holidays, one per week,” says Mohammed. “I worked from home in the mornings and I was on call in the afternoons. During this time, I received only one call and I was able to solve the problem remotely, so I didn’t have to come on site.”
Many more services, including the eight security guards at the B and Prevessin entrances, were indeed as active as always during the Christmas period (we can’t call it a “break” for them!). We obviously couldn’t reach everyone who worked during the closure, but we would still like to pay homage to each of them and wish all of our readers a very happy New Year!
