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On the other hand, this past week Jodi and I indulged our subversive sides and purchased a few coffee mugs from www.despair.com<\/a>. Despair.com makes anti-inspirational posters, such as “Worth: just because you’re necessary doesn’t mean you’re important.” The backdrop to these sage words of advice (critical for anybody on a large collaboration like BaBar) was a series of interlocking gears all turning in step. Another mug we purchased simply read, “Quality: The race for quality has no finish line, so technically it’s more like a death march.” These are funny, but they are also excellent reminders to all of us on large experiments.<\/p>\nDon’t think that just because you have half a dozen things to do for the experiment, that you’re important. You’re necessary – if you don’t do the work, nobody else will. But you’re probably not going to get a Nobel for it (if that’s important to you). Of course, worth is an issue of perception. I know just as many “data dork” physicists, armchair jockeys who spend their day mesmerized by their physics analysis work, who discount computational problems as I know computational physicists who see the data dorks as arrogant pricks that think experiments run themselves. Of course, without either the experiment wouldn’t function, but good luck getting in the middle of that one.<\/p>\n
I guess what I am getting at is this: I have to be careful not to think that just because I have all of this “important” work to do, that I need to spend every night until 1 am doing it. You gotta take time for yourself, even during conference season (especially during conference season?). The most important thing to remember is another great saying from despair.com: “Pressure: it can turn a lump of coal into a flawless diamond, or an average person into a perfect basketcase.”<\/p>\n
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