from Travis S. at BNL

Travis is one of the Machine Specialists in the Collider-Accelerator Department at BNL.

I don't like many people. I respect fewer, and the number whose opinions mean anything to me is very small. Leif was always in all three of those camps. There was nothing worse than going to work and doing something dumb when he was there. He would never say anything, he wouldn't even give me a look, but just knowing that I may have let him down — it was no good.

I think everybody that came up can talk about how brilliant he was, how he loved to be a teacher — he was just amazing. My favorite story of Leif is nothing like that. It's probably almost twenty years ago now. I came into work on a Sunday morning, 7AM for a day shift. Leif was already there working.

The way they had the Control Room set up — there was one console where all the interesting signals came in, and then you had to pipe that signal around like an old switchboard operator to somewhere else where you were working. So I watched Leif go over, set some signals up, send them over to his scope, and he'd go over and start taking a look.

We had an operator who was…interesting. He liked to help you in ways that were not helpful at all. So he was looking from across the room at what Leif was doing, and he decided he's going to help him out. So he walked over to the console, looked at the set-up, unplugged Leif's scope and put the signals into his own. And then he went over to start looking.

Leif started getting more and more agitated. I only peripherally caught all of this, because I was reading the log, seeing what's going on. But he's murmuring, he's murmuring louder and louder…finally he gets up and walks back over to where the signals were, and just as he realizes what's happened, the operator tells him how he's going to help him.

He said, "Leif I don't think you're looking at the signals you want to be looking at."

And Leif let loose the most beautiful tirade of F-bombs I have ever heard in my life. The sanitized version was, "I didn't wake up at 5AM to come here and have you destroy all my work."

Sitting between the two people was our newest operator — she'd been there about three weeks — and she got so low in her seat that I couldn't see the top of her head anymore. And I just burst out laughing. I couldn't control it.

Leif whirled on me so fast — I didn't know anyone could move that quickly. But in that instant, he realized what he had done, he shut it off, and he just looked at me and smirked, and walked back to his console.

It was easy to consider him perfect, and just seeing him utterly lose his shit like that made it even better.