Useless Orifice

Oh my god.  I am a CERN user.  Hence, I am priveleged enough to have the opportunity to interact with a very special group of people here at the lab: the Users’ Office.  Today, I will introduce you to this incredibly useful resource by holding a tutorial on the use of their website; trust me — you’ll need help.  Feel free to follow along with the screenshots presented below, or have a look at the site yourself: Start Here!

A great start to a great site.

Say you have one (1) task to accomplish on the U.O. website:

1. You need to figure out what is required for a move to CERN (e.g., from your home institution)

That’s it. To begin, you have a few options based on the offerings on the lovely home page.  Intuitively, you would choose to click on the ‘Before Coming to CERN’ link.  After clicking, up pops a lovely PDF file with a flowchart; after three minutes of perusing this, you realize it’s the flowchart from hell.  In fact, you’re not even sure where to go from the first balloon.  Back to the drawing board. Glancing again at the home page, you think, “Perhaps it’s useful to read the Newcomers Guide — after all, it’s on my to-do list.”  After clicking the link (NB: you can choose the link from the menu sidebar or from the body of the page), you’re shocked and astounded by the transformation which has taken place.

Behold -- the guide for Newcomers

Realizing immediately that you’ve left the normal U.O. domain,  you start to feel alienated by the new menu sidebar look.  Luckily, they’ve tried to make you feel at home by maintaing the “Untitled Document” title.  Unscathed, you continue on your quest to understand the requirements for arriving safely at CERN.  Glancing down the menu sidebar, you decide to bypass the first five links, and head directly to Special documents.  So far, so good — so you thought.  The first piece of advice presented to you here is to contact the Users’ Office! Realizing that this website must have been created to alleviate some of the need for direct communication, you decide to ignore that instruction.

Remembering that you were confused by the first balloon in the flowchart, you decide to find out whether or not you need a visa for Switzerland and France.  But, alas!  The site for this tidbit of information doesn’t exist! But you, you’re tough; you’re not giving up until you find what you’re looking for.  Back to the home page you go.  From the broken link, you could click the ‘Home’ link, which is on the top menu.  But, don’t bother.  It’s broken.  Instead, you’ll have to use your browser history or click here.

Perusing further your to-do list, you see that there is a page describing “special documents” required for newcomers. As this is a promising lead, you click its link, very cautiously…it works! From here, you see that it’s actually possible to find out if you need a visa, and, if so, what type of visa you have to acquire.

Visas == Check-In Procedure

At this point, I hope you’re sufficiently disgusted; we can continue later. For now, bookmark a page from the selection of U.O. pages (pick your favorite — here’s mine), and unwind.

Tune in next time, when we’ll highlight more of the useful resources the U.O. has compiled to get you settled in here at CERN.  In particular, we’ll take a look at their FAQ page, which should prove to be the most useful (i.e., useless) set of tips they provide!  Meanwhile, try your hand at browsing through some of the many valuable facets of the U.O. websites.  We could all learn something from their brilliant design model.