Third class citizens

I am tormenting myself and getting more wound up by the minute. I am sure posting here won't help matters and I ought to just let it go. Why can't I let things go?

So we run a particle accelerator here. But I am in the group that does experiments using it, not the group running it. The experiments are the thing. Why bother just running the accelerator without experiments? Well, because it's there, obviously (and I do kind of mean that- sometimes you wonder whether people just make up excuses to play with toys). But the experimental group ends up playing second fiddle to the people delivering beam.

The physicists optimising the accelerator work 8am-6pm Mon-Fri. They don't work alone- outside of that period there are the operators who keep it ticking over, maintaining its state. It's a difference in ability of personnel and that's just the way it is.

So sometimes the experimenters need to change their experiment. And because of its complexity, this takes many hours of work. The accelerator needs to be turned off as we don't really want to die from radiation when we work on the equipment. We are able to do this once a week.

The issue is that the professional accelerator whisperers don't want their time wasted. So they want the operators to be the ones to turn on the accelerator and bring it to the minimal state that is within their abilities.

So... say we go in to the tunnel to do work at 6pm, immediately after the physicist clocks off for the day. Some time later, the work ends and the beam is turned back on again. There is some work to get it to a minimal state. The physicists come in and make it all better still.

Since the physicists come in at 8am, they need the "some work to get to a minimal state" to occur overnight. This is okay- the operators are shiftworkers (unionised shift workers at that). There is a rota for days on and days off. It all works- many of them have been doing that work for years, even decades.

Apparently it takes about 8 hours for them to get the machine to a good state.

However they haven't been doing it.

So the time for them to start bringing the beam back has incrementally been moving... 11pm... 10pm... Now it's at 4pm.

That leaves us with 6pm to 4pm to do all our work which is 6 or 7 hours less than it should be if the operators were actually competent*. And yes, it means we need to work overnight.

Next week, someone is scheduled to get 6 hours break between his two shifts. And that was the best option we could come up with- initially, he was working 14 hours straight but then we scaled back on our ambitions knowing that it will eventually bite us in the behind when we are up against our deadline of the 13th for having completed our installation. For the record, last Tuesday he and I got 7 hours break between our shifts (4am to 11am) which allowed a decent 5 hours sleep. It was okay this week but next week, he's using a class 4 laser which is a dangerous piece of equipment (it can blind you).

Whatever, we swallow it. We swallow it because we just want to get the experiments done.

But why can't the operators just be competent? And why can't the physicists just come in later in the day to do their work? Why is it reasonable to force us to work overnight when we are dealing with laser death rays? Why is it reasonable for us to have less than 8 hours between shifts? Why are we expected to work 7 days a week when everyone else gets either weekends or days off in lieu?

* This is how it appears. Maybe there is a legitimate reason for this issue but no one has presented one and the general feeling is that there is a problem within this group.