Day 7 of a Week-long Evening Shift

There is no beam, and the hall is open for supervised access. The powers-that-be thought it sensible to have the shift crew available to be buddies for people who need access, so I'm on call. I'm sitting in the Wisconsin office in the trailers, waiting for a phone call and trying to plan out a scheme for evaluating a possible extension to our muon trigger. This isn't "physicist greed," as our chief engineer describes it. The luminosity/intensity has gone up so high that the Level-1 fast tracker needs all 4 planes to reconstruct a good track instead of junk. That means the 3-layer tracking will be turned off, which cuts out the track-to-stub matching for our detector. Or in short, we lose our trigger, and so only appear as random volunteer muons in the data.

So, we have to try to use the upgraded silicon tracker (which is still in the process of being built, and for which I am obligated to write software). Naturally we have first things first, and the tracker has to work before we can spend money on additions. But--I need to make sure there's room for the additions!

Not an exciting evening. I set the "ical" scheduler to notify me every two hours. Every two hours I interrupt the coding/debugging to call the CDF control room. And I stay in the office in case somebody calls. And I got the code working, and the results make sense. . .