The growth in scale of particle physics experiments over the last two decades has led to a situation where building and commissioning an experiment has become a rare event, and subsequently there is a dearth of educational experience in the hardware aspects for young scientists, as recognized by the DPF in the formation of a "Instrumentation Task Force" in 2011. As my own contribution to this effort, this seminar turns the paradigm of the "single slide overview" of the instrument followed by a focus on the analysis on its head, using several examples to describe in detail occurrences where thorough understanding of the instrumental behavior was critical to the physics performance.
