A friend told me this funny anecdote about the construction of a part of the inner tracker of the CDF detector called "ISL", the so-called "intermediate silicon layers" which were constructed in Italy and then sent to Fermilab for installation in the core of CDF.
A technician reports: "When we were finished with the construction and we had to move to Fermilab to install the device, he took extreme care to arrange the shipment of the expensive, sensitive device overseas in three parts, with three separate cargos, such that if a plane had an accident, we would only lose a third of the detector.
...However, he sent us (all the technicians who had done the assembly, and were now needed at Fermilab for the installation) all in the same plane!"
If you are cynical enough to consider the matter from the point of view of the good of the CDF experiment, it is clear why losing the ISL is more damaging to the experiment: one would be able to quickly replace the technicians, while rebuilding the ISL from scratch would take years!
