LHC Quarked up after Wrong Sort of Big Bang

Earlier this month the scientific world’s bespectacled anorak gang, aka the Mensa Morons, with more degrees than a thermometer and less common sense than a business of lemmings, posed for media cameramen while quaffing firkins of champagne and grinning like Cheshire cats.

The most powerful atom smasher to be built since the destruction and sinking of Atlantis had just been switched on to global acclaim and the anoraks were ready to begin experiments that could unlock many of the enduring mysteries of the Universe: beginning with such enigmatic conundrums as to why the chicken crossed the road, how long is a piece of string, who really killed Cock Robin and why UK council tax is so fucking high.

Collective optimism often being a harbinger of Doom, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) created the wrong sort of big bang last weekend, causing a fault so serious that CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, announced last night that the particle accelerator would have to be shut down until a team of CORGI-registered plumbers could expedite repairs.

CERN director-general Ms. Candida Twatrot (NVQ 1 Particle Physics) informed reporters at last night’s press conference “It’s probably our own fault for employing the blokes from Scrapheap Challenge to help out with the LHC’s last minute assembly glitches and buying second-hand superconducting magnets from a car boot sale in Croydon.”

Preliminary investigations into the incident, in which huge quantities of helium and Bird’s premium custard leaked from the LHC’s cooling matrix, have further attributed the system failures to sub-standard copper piping supplied by B & Q and hiring unsupervised Albanian and Polish plumbers on a daily cash in hand basis.

Ronnie Pickersgill, a former Scunthorpe wheelbarrow mechanic now acting as CERN’s head of Advanced Guesswork division, advised media reporters that beams of protons travelling around the collider’s 17-mile (27km) circumference ring at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light had caused the main helium / custard cooling matrix to overheat, resulting in coolant leaks and the failure of a ten kilometer stretch of superconducter magnets.

Pickersgill further elaborated “In my opinion the protons are going far too fuckin' fast for safe operations. People tend to forget the LHC’s main ring is constructed out of half inch MDF, not the specified laminated titanium alloys as they were too expensive, so protons whizzing around inside at 185,362 miles per second have a tendency to knock the shit out of it.”
“When the helium / custard cooling system reservoirs ran dry, the MDF caught fire and what we scientific types call a ‘massive quench’ occurred”, Pickersgill explained.

When asked by the puzzled media to put the term ‘massive quench’ into everyday layman’s language he replied “A right major fuck-up.”