Clyde and Bonnie: a Tale of TRIUMF

In 1982 I was a Summer Student at a particle accelerator, TRIUMF, working in the Beamlines Group. This group is not the Physicists per se, it is the technicians responsible for the equipment along the beam line. One day I was given instructions for stenciling information onto two magnets that were being installed. Don't think fridge magnet, think step ladder to get up to where you do the stenciling. These things are moved with a crane and aligned with the help of a surveyor. So various information was to be painted on using stencils, I believe on the top and two sides. That makes 6 sets of labels. There weren't enough stencils to do it all in one go, I'd have to decide how to do it in bits. So far pretty mundane.

Then 2 technicians explained the challenging part to me. They said something like "we are from the Beamlines Magnet Naming Committee" (which I assume to have been an ad hoc committee with two members). "We are tired of working on things with mundane technical names like 'spin precession dipole', so you are going to label this one as Bonnie and that one as Clyde. We don't know if this will be appreciated or not so you'll need to find a way to be finished before anyone notices". That part felt like a bit of a challenge. There seemed to be a lot of people all around all the time, including the Director and other bigwigs. This was 35 years ago, I don't remember much of the details, but juggling limited stencils and putting on the official information interspersed with the names, I tried to put the names on in the least looked at locations (top, opposite side to the door) first, with the facing the door labels being last. That seemed to work, if anybody noticed while I was doing it they didn't stop me (or even comment) at the time.

In fact, the lack of anybody seeming to notice at all seemed a bit disconcerting after all that anxiety about not being caught until I was done. Then at a talk given to the summer students I finally heard mention of it among the things that had been accomplished that summer. The speaker pointed out that someone had put names onto these magnets when they were installed, but had done it from the perspective of someone walking into the hall and seeing the labels Bonnie on the left at Clyde on the right. However, he said that isn't the Physicist's perspective. Our persepective is going down the beamline. So the magnets are actually "Clyde and Bonnie". No reprimand, just a bit of mockery!