zlacker

During particle physics experiments, the number of reactions of interest that get detected is an important thing to monitor. If you stop measuring the reaction of interest, it might mean that a magnet drifted out of preferred tuning, that your data acquisition crashed, but the key thing is that something requires human intervention to fix. Frequently, the trigger signal, which has a short pulse anytime data are to be collected, would be sent into a speaker. You get a buzzing, not unlike a Geiger counter at high rates, which blends into the background noise, and that tells you how healthy the experiment is.

The funniest thing was seeing how everybody was paying attention to that buzzing at all times. You could have a dozen people talking about different aspects of the experiment, but if that buzzing drops out for a few seconds, every single conversation immediately stops. Usually it would come back after a few seconds and the conversations would resume, but it was fascinating to have visible proof that everybody was ready to drop their current work in order to get the experiment running again if anything happened.

Edit: I also heard tales of somebody who had trained themselves to wake up if the buzzing ever stopped. That way, they could take short naps during the night shift, while still being present and ready to resolve any issues that came up.