Shifting sand

My name is Phil, and I am a member of the Hermes particle physics collaboration. There. I said it. I spent over three years helping to keep the Hermes experiment on the road, and in the end I went a bit mad. I stopped doing any useful work at the start of 2005 and have been trying to sort out my head ever since. Perhaps mad is the wrong word: to be more accurate I had psychosomatic illnesses and depression, which is probably what most people whould call mad, loopy, off your trolley, a wafer short of a silicon detector or whatever. I willingly invited people to knock me out and stick an endoscope down my stomach, when there was nothing wrong with my stomach at all, and if that isn't madness it certainly isn't quite the behaviour of a normal-thinking person.

If I had any principles about me I would have quit the Hermes collaboration on the 24th February, right after I finished my PhD exam. I would have written a mail to the whole collaboration and told them that their beloved collaboration was a rotten mess of an overworked workaholic management, overworked frustrated students, numerous hangers-on who were concentrating on other projects but sticking around to get their names on the publications, and senior scientists who had lost touch with the daily reality of what was happening. This would have left me unemployed but with my dignity intact. As it is I have become a hanger-on, somebody who is there in name but does practically sod all to help the collaboration. I let others work themselves to stupidity so that I can stick my name to some publication which I don't properly understand.

The Hermes experiment seems to be in a critical state. It wasn't feeling well, so someone stuck an endoscope down its machine equivalent of a tummy and it did the machine equivalent of spewing up its guts in the examination room. The next few days/weeks will decide whether there is a future (other than as radiation enriched scrap metal) for this experiment.

In the circumstances, I did the only thing possible: I took the afternoon off work to help vogelchr fill his sand pit. I feel that this was a worthwhile project. There was a plan, we carted some sand, and the result was one sand-filled sand pit, and at least two sand-covered children.