Nov 11

Nov 11
The sink went down today because a tank did not drain in the scheduled time. It ended up being down for about 3 hours before maintenance came to look at it. When they did finally come, he couldn’t get the tank to respond, so he shut it down and all the lights went off in the sink. The bay went really dark! When he turned the sink back on he walked away to either go look at something or get a tool, and the sink turned off by itself. That was not supposed to happen. All of the tanks drained when the sink turned itself off.
After that I looked at our internal program called “navigo” which shows all the machines in the fab and has a color chart for if they are up, down, in qual, under maintenance, or under engineering observation. When looking at the program, I noticed that 5 of the 9 sinks were down / under maintenance.
My old Bay 4A coworker who is now in Bay 5A/6A came and got me to show me why is sink was down. He was running a single wafer when the robot picked up the wafer out of the cassette and the wafer somehow it tipped out of the teeth of the comb arms and landed flat against them like demonstrated below with a top view drawing.

Turned out one of the teeth had a crack in it, so when the wafer shifted during the lift the tooth behind it did not hold the shift and the wafer slipped. The last time that happened it slipped between the teeth and landed in the hole below but didn’t break.
At the beginning of the shift B4a coworker walked into the bay and said “I’m doing ash today, and there is nothing you can do about it.” I think it was because he got in trouble yesterday for being caught in Bay 11D talking more than six times, and our lead was mad that he left me to run the bay by myself which isn’t hard when it is slow but even when it is slow it is still nice for that extra hand to run sink or scope, or if any work for the etchers.

The Numbers
Last week we had the numbers meeting. I think this also got to B4A’s head with wanting to run ash. Mostly because anyone who runs the ashers will be number 1 in the fab. So he was running ash all day and I was fine with that. However, I was running the sink until it went down for a while, the scope, the descum and helping another bay and was staying on par with his numbers all night which just shows that he is just lazy... Which he is. He sometimes disappears for 30 to 75 minutes at a time.
This really pisses me off because he just got hired to "the company" full time and I still may not have a job because my supervisors still don’t know if the temps will keep there jobs. All the people that are already full time employees are saying the company will "probably" keep the temps because they will need people that already know the job. It annoys me to great lengths that he got hired on as full time. I think they only hired him because they released they had kept him as a temp for 11 months by the time they started the switch over paperwork.
However the temps don’t get paid time off, PTO, holiday pay, vacation pay, or time bank. It was confirmed today that the fab will have a shutdown from December 20 to January 3rd. No one but maintenance will be working in the two weeks. No product will be moving. I get no pay for 2 weeks during the holiday season but my lazy B4A coworker does.

Nov 10th- oops skipped some days.

Nov 10th
Again this week I forgot it was Tuesday. I was also disappointed to find out it is the long week. How could I forget?? Where has my mind been??
Came into work in my “this morning” to find out 2 ashers were down. 36 due to a gas leak and 53 due to it breaking a wafer in the machine. Unknown how the machine managed to break the wafer without human interference, but it did and a 3rd was going down because our weekly task qual was due on 50 ash. So I had the first 3 hours of the day with 3 of 6 ashers.
Thankfully work has slowed down due to the company being bought out and switching management come the first of the year. Which no one can still answer if I’ll have a job.
Basically i work for a temp company, not "the company." The New company is buying out "the company," but may not take over the contract for temp company. Everyone working for "the company" is getting an offer letter for the New company. I’m not working for "the company" I’m working for temp company. I asked my super when "the company" is doing another round of hiring/ switch over of temp company employees to full time at "the company, and he responded with "after the first of the year"... Which could mean they will have no temps to switch over because as of yet the New company hasn't signed the contact with the temp company. So the temps (including me) are still worrying about if the will have a job in 1.5 months or not... (edit: the temps got an email for the director of payroll Dec 11th stating that the New company did decide to sign the contract and keep the temp employees, and my lead is pushing my super to hire me on full time under the New company "officially" as soon as we get back from the shutdown... which spoilers sweetie...)

In other news my coworker in 11D and only other Doctor Who fan at work thinks I’ve only been here 2 months and I’ve told him it’s been 4 and his mind exploded. We work in a clean room so we had to call someone to pick it up.

And to end my night, I ran my car really hard into a curb and messed it up… messed it up really really good. So I’m out of a car for at least 2 weeks.
(edit: Ended up being 3, but its all fixed up now)

Nov 15--- SO Far behind. I write my posts down daily, but i dont type often.

Nov 15th

I've been such a bad Doctor Who fan lately. I force my dad back into it, watch up to current with him and for the past two weeks have made him watch the new episodes alone because I had friends spending the night so I'm two episodes behind and this weekend I don't have anything planned yet so I might be able to actually watch the two I've missed and the new one with him. If he doesn't mind re-watching them. For the last two nights I've slept on my guest mattress and it has been painful. I love the bed, I hate the mattress. It is like sleeping on the rock the Flintstones sleep on.

My body hurts so much today. I'm four hours into my shift and I am fighting to stay awake. It is my fault though. My friend asked if I was sure about switching beds for the weekend and I said yes because I needed to work on the computer. Ouch, never again! Note to self, when out of debt, new mattresses. For now the main one i sleep on has a memory foam pad over the mattress and that does help out a LOT! But still..... new awesome soft mattresses in years to come.

Nov 8. Nov 9

Nov 8
49 Ash - error "Right paddle wafer detector indicates water has been lost." Where'd it go? The machine was down all night but came up 10 minutes before shift change and needed a qual. The qual takes usually about 1 hour so we didn't start it. Had to tell next shift it needed done.

It ended up going down because when the arm went to go pick up a wafer it somehow took the whole cassette with it and all the wafers dumped into the machine. Amazingly none of them broke, however the mechanic did break one when he was manually moving the arm to return the wafers back into the cassettes. The arm was moving too swiftly and the wafer flipped off.

Nov 9th
The roommate who usually wakes me up went to a dinner party this night. I knew this and thought I set many alarms…not sure if I set any now that I think of it. She did say she would call…and she did not.
So I woke up, looked at my phone and the time looked weird…! I thought, “I never see this time on my phone anymore…” Well shit it was 6 pm and work starts at 5:45pm. That’s why I haven’t seen this time in nearly 4 months!
So I was angry and upset. I was rushing to eat, make lunch, and drive to work. I got to work at 6:25. 40 minutes late!! This was just the start of my good ol’ craptastic day. The rest of the day didn’t have much to do with work though. (Added edit: Apparently I didn’t write down the rest of what happened, so we are both in on this cliffhanger.)
When I got home, I looked up classes for the next semester of school. I have to get school going again, and get it done with. … I’m just so lazy.

So far behind. Nov 3

Nov 3
I forgot it was Tuesday. On Tuesday we have to complete a "weekly task" goal on 50 ash by 10 pm. I usually get it started right away and have it done by 7p but today it completely slipped my mind and my coworker was starting the qual. I didn't even know until after I tried to load the tool with more product and the door was sealed.

D1 shift told us that 36 as went down and just before shift change maintenance fixed it and brought it back up to qual. So after it took my coworker 2 hours to do the first qual (which takes me < 1 hour), he is starting the second...I would have done them at the same time. Most of the time he just doesn’t think ahead.



(when i write these notes down on my paper at work it looks like the posts are going to be so much longer than what they actually turn out to be.)

Nov 1 & 2

Nov 1
Today was a slow but good day. CWB4A was working on a qual for 24 etch all day. I think we maybe ran 15 lots all day which is fine, more for me. Better my chances to stay # 1. :)

Also the maintenance people finally got 12 ash back up. It has been down for a week! We have to qual It and then run some product on it to make sure it runs.

Nov 2
It ran with no problems in fact after 12 ash came up there was tons of work for it so it has run non-stop since being fixed.

We had a kind of meeting today. It wasn’t really a meeting about the products or company but about the numbers of the shifts and company in general. The spreadsheet my super had was from Sept 20th to Oct 25th. On the days I work I’m usually number on in track outs. But when these numbers were taken over the last 5 weeks I was on vacation in Alaska and Canada for 2 of the 5 weeks. Because of my vacation I wasn’t doing any track outs so I dropped in rank from #1 over all to #3. I wonder if we’ll have another numbers meeting again. Other things in this meeting were over-all product moves between all 4 shifts, and N1 (my shift) was WAY above the over shifts. There was also a “compliance” rating when it came to following our product program. The program is integrated into all of the tools. On all of the computer screens attached to tools it shows a list of products that should run on that tool. When there are many of the same tools the program decided which product runs on which tool, but the product can run on any tool. The shift gets points for every product you run on the tool it has been assigned to. Our shift was in 3rd of 4, mostly because we haven’t been following the program in my bay. Oh well. The goal is to get the compliance above 80% by the end of the quarter.

**Update as of Dec 12th, we still haven’t had another. I guess my super doesn’t want to show everyone that I’m kicking ass. Also we don’t know where our compliance rate it. I’m thinking it still isn’t in the 80s yet.

Oct 28-31

On Oct 28 when I was on my 4am break I got a Facebook message from the parents of the girl I babysit for. They were asking if I could last minute babysit at 1pm on the 29th. 1pm is usually the time when I'm still sleeping due to my schedule but I don't go in on Thursday nights so I agreed. I could use the extra cash where I can get it. Then on the 29th her mother calls me at 12 to last minute cancel the babysitting. Okay, I went back to sleep.

Later that night the girl's father sent me a text and asks if I can babysit on the 30th at 7 am. I agreed… just after I agreed he calls my sister and asks if she can come at 7 and asked her if I could just "break" her because he doesn’t' think I'll be on time. She said no, that if I said I’d be there, I’d be there.

It was raining really hard the morning of the 30th so my sister ended up dropping me off. All went well through the day when they got home they invited me to the Halloween party they were throwing at the 31st. I went with my mom and brother. I thought they invited more people to their party but when we got there it was just my family and two other couples they had invited. And most of my family wasn’t able to make it which made us feel bad after.

Oct 27

Nothing interesting happened before 8:30 today. The ash work is still slow but the descum has a lot of work today. I usually only get 10 lots a day and so far have done 9 lots and have 8 lined up in queue and it’s only 9 pm.
Left a letter on the desk of the day shift…hopefully I will get a call by the end of November, I may need a new notebook for work as I keep using it to make letters for the supers if I miss the chance to talk to them in the lab and letters for the other shifts supers for overtime and notes on what I’m going to say in the blog while I remember it. Arg! Only 19 pages left from a book of 100.
Skunk gross!
We have a filtered air system that is supposed to help us with particles, but whenever a skunk sprays in the area the air system picks it up and spreads it through the lab and it smells like purified skunk spray. I wonder if it still has particles, it must or else your nose shouldn’t be able to pick it up, right?

Oct 26

The day started slow D1 shift said it was busy for them…they must have it slower than we do if our slow is “busy”. Again no more than 10 lots an hour and the day has just begun…**yawn**!
Coworker from Bay 2A was standing behind me with a priority 1 (P1) lot but didn’t say anything. I had my back to the opening of the bay so I didn’t know that he was there. As I was humming to myself I turned around to check a lot and jumped out of my skin. He laughed. I laughed terrified. He gave me the P1 and an hour later he saw on his machine that it was coming back to him so he came to retrieve it and pretended to jump when he entered my bay as I was leaving to deliver it back. He laughed again (I didn’t jump that time).
That was the most exciting part of the day and it all happened before 8:30pm… the day was going to be long.
Priority 1 (P1) lots are the only product lots that have to be hand delivered to the next tool. For nearly a hour and a half there was no work dispatched to my bay. Hour and a half! I thought the system crashed. Then just before 10:30, two, I repeat, two lots were dispatched. Then again, nothing. Waiting sucks.
I went to another bay in my department to see if there was any work to do there. Nope. Guess for now the work is stuck in another department.
My lead saw that my coworker and I were bored because we get our work down quicker and were waiting on work to be dispatched to us. So, we were sitting and talking. I was reading a spec about the holiday shut down so she trained him on 36sink and I trained on 28sink. So now when we have nothing to do she’ll probably pull on one of us to do the sink that has the most backed up work.
On a side note, I’ve basically begged for the last two months to get overtime on a N2 shift… I think I’m going to break down and ask the D2 supervisor. (Future note, I did end up asking D2 super, and still haven’t gotten a call for overtime.  )

Oct 25

Today my bay coworker was walking away from the sink with an empty cassette and hit it against the sink wall accidentally and it slipped out of his hands, dropping it. The cassette did a pretty awesome “open book pelvis split”. He has never seen this happen and neither had I. He took it down to the cassette cleaning room where they clean and dispose of broken cassettes. The cleaning lady says it happens nearly daily and had a big pile of broken cassettes.
Also today I loaded 49 Ash and when I put the cassette down on the sensor and the ball bearing rolled out from under the platform and into a small hole. I thought about grabbing it but the door was already starting to close. So… no! Then I went to tell my bay coworker because I didn’t know if it was important. As I was telling him he said “it must have been as the machine just signed itself down”. When the maintenance man came he told him about the ball bearing. The man fixed it and made a comment on our program that it had broken off a sensor. It had been an interesting day and it was all before 8:30. The rest of the day was SLOW. Maybe 6 lots an hour. (on a usual quicker day we could do at least 50 lots an hour)

Oct 19

The latex gloves in this batch are thinner than usual. In less than 3 hours I tore holes in 3 gloves. I usually only tear one hole in a glove once a week. 3 times in one day is unheard of.
I remembered an event today that happened back in August. I was at the mall with two friends and we stopped by Auntie Annie’s Pretzels. At this time they were doing a fundraiser for kids with cancer. The cashier asked if I’d like to donate, I said no. He then said “Oh! I didn’t realize you didn’t like kids, sorry I asked.” … The fuck? His female coworker than tried to cover up what he said by saying “I’m sure you like kids, might not have any money to spare today.” … What? Two judgements in one day and I just wanted pretzels…the fuck? If I wanted your judgment, I would have said I don’t support funds for kids with cancer…nature obviously doesn’t want them to live.

Oct 18

Never have I seen so many blue suits (mechanics) in my bay at one time. There was a burning smell coming off one of the machines and they couldn’t tell which one. So I think they guessed and took down 12ash. During this time, I tell them I think it’s 53ash because a product wafer has been stuck in a back chamber for nearly 2 hours. They ignored me. 30 minutes later my coworker signs the machine down to maintenance because the water is still in the machine. 25 wafers usually takes 30 minutes total depending on the recipe. Not 30 minutes each…ever.

email notifications

Way back when I started this I set up email notifications to be sent to some people. I forgot about these notifications and those people were still getting them to this day. I didn’t even re ask if they wanted to continue to get them. So I deleted all email addresses that were set up to get them. If you wish to continue to get them again, text/email/Facebook me letting me know you'd like to get post updates.

Back to the beginning

Back in the beginning, when I first got hired at this company, in training class we were told for the first 6- 18 weeks we were to take breaks with our trainer because we were not supposed to be in the bay alone. Apparently they don't tell the leads this- but back to that later.
During my first day I met my trainer in the fab, a young kid, he starts teaching me the way of the fab. The first thing he teaches me how to run is the sink in the bay call "34sink." after we load the product into the sink he tells me "not to worry the sink never goes down" just as he finishes saying this about 3 warnings go off and the sink goes down... and ends up being down for the 2 days. My first week of work is on what is referred to as "the long week"

Good time to pause again and fill in some details.
"Bay" - in the fab there is a main hall way and side hallways on that split from it. Those splits are called bays. There are 16 bays; well technically there are 32 bays. The bays 1-6 are split left side 1-6 A, right side 1-6 B, left 7-11 C, right side 7-11 D, left 12-16 E, and right 12-16 F. In the beginning I am assigned to 4A.
In my bay there are 6 different types of machines. Type 1 is called "the ashers" and there are 6 of them, 36ash, 49ash, 50ash, 52ash, 53ash, and 54ash. Type 2 "descum," there are 3 of them, 11ash, 12ash, 13ash. Type 3 "metetch," just one 24etch. Type 4 "etcher," 72etch. Type 5 "scope," 23scope. Type 6 "sink," 34sink. My bay does not have the most amount of tools, but it is by far the busiest. In the fab there are only three descumming machines, all in my bay. In the fab there are a total of 7 ashers, 6 of them are in my bay. During the fabrication process every product at multiple points during its production run has to go thru the ashers. So if we don’t run the loan asher in another bay every product has to go thru my bay, every day. On a typical day we have 50,000+ products going thru the fab.
Compressed work week. I work a shift called Night One or N1. I work Sunday - Tuesday or Sunday - Wednesday. All work days are 5:45p-6a
My short week is Sun - Tues, my long week is Sun - Wed, they switch between the two weeks every week.
Up or Down. Up means it is able to run the product, down means for any reason under the sun the machine threw a(n) error(s) and shut itself down for maintenance to go and look at it. Maintenance looks at it and fixes the error(s). After they fix the error(s) the sign the tools back up to qual (qualification).
Qual- means we, the fab techs, have to run test wafers to make sure that any partials exposed into the tool catch onto a test wafer and not a production wafer.
Product/ production wafer are interchangeable words.
Machine/ tool are interchangeable words.

Resume
My first week of work was on my long week. So I had to work 4, 12 hour shifts back to back. It was difficult. Back to the sink. The sink was down Sunday and Monday. came back up on Tuesday was up for about 3 hours and was down again for the next two weeks due to some mechanical front end error. During that time I learned to run the other tools in the bay, the scope is by far the most boring tool. I love running the sink.

So I learned these tools for a total of 14 days (or a month of work) and needed to take my certification tests to prove that I knew the tools. During the time of taking my cert tests my lead was getting impatient and was trying to tell my trainer that we needed to start taking different lunch breaks. Which makes since, BUT according to my training class before getting into the fab we were told we could not be left to run the tools without our trainer. So I informed my lead of this. She was reluctant but basically gave me another week to get it figured out. The next week was up and my trainer and I had to figure out new lunch times. When going at the same time the lunch breaks were 11 pm and 3 am. I basically begged my trainer to let me keep the 11am (even though he'd that time for the last 6 months...) he said okay, and I changed my last break at 4am.

the bet that my dad doesnt regret.

I was losing faith in myself going thru my calculus classes. I was taking the same class over and over again which was suck. I felt like I was wasting my time and my dad’s money for paying for classes I was failing. However over those couple of years on taking calculus classes I was trying to get my dad into watching Doctor Who. He kept telling me no because he use to watch it as a kid and knew that if he started watching the new series he would have to catch up with all of it. Sometime in the fall of 2014 we were having a late night veg fest watching TV and talking and there were some Doctor Who eps that came on. I took this time to fill in some "before these eps" background story. We watched 4 eps in a row and had to stop watching them because the next few eps were out of order and broke the story arch. At this point we were still talking, and were talking about my fears of the Cal classes... So he made a bet "if you pass Cal 3, we'll watch all of new Doctor Who." Hands were shook. So I signed up for my Cal 3 class.

Months later I started my Cal 3 class, which was an online class, and continued to fear because the class was so difficult... mostly because it was online and I was working a time consuming job. So it was self-taught in I had the time. But I had to make the time even if it was at 10p.

Fast forward months later I passed all my tests, and I totally passed my final.
Then I got fired, and we started our Doctor Who marathon starting from the 2005 series. We finished the marathon of Doctor Who just in time to watch the start of the new season....However the new season started on Sept 20th, and Sept 19th my family went on a cruise for 10 days plus a few extra days in our departure city. When we got home we had 3 episodes to watch. The only thing that is lame about this is that we have to wait a week between each episode…. We can’t just binge watch them.

However next summer it sounds like we may be catching him up on the Walking Dead series.

February.

8 months. A person’s life can change drastically in 8 months. A person’s life can change over a single night. Fortunately I'm not that person. My journey thru life hasn't changed drastically, or overnight. It has changed though, and it has become increasingly more frustrating.
In February around the time of my last post I was probably stressing about my calculus 3 class, which I had every right to... I mean, come on, it was calculus 3.... 3!

Referring back to the last post my (ooo, now then) boss took over the contract as I stated and I took over billing and credentialing. And I was rocking it! I was doing so well..... Or so I thought. Well I was doing perfect, but that only lasted for 2 months. At the end of March she gave me BACK the contract but this time didn’t take anything away from me... So I had LESS hours, TWICE as much work and one day off a week. I was still expected to have everything done in the same amount of time. Then the end of April comes around and the boss has a mental breakdown and disappears for over a week. Doesn’t respond to emails, doesn’t respond to text messages, and doesn’t answer phone calls. So when the coworkers had problems that we couldn’t fix we didn’t even have a way to get them the answers the desperately needed. It was worse when the customers need questions answered and we couldn’t help them. When the boss finally comes back she gave me ANOTHER big project to get started on and still doesn’t take any other responsibilities off my hands. To her everything was a priority one, so since she couldn’t prioritize what I needed to do, I did it for her. Things I felt were less important got done if I got around to them. Then after all that, I GET THIS:



Uber super suck. I got this letter two weeks I finished my final for my Cal 3 class. One of the reasons she verbally told me she was firing me "laying me off" was because they just couldn’t afford to be working around my school schedule..... Which they knew when they hired me. I even took OFF a semester of school to give them more time during a transition period. AND I turned in false time cards showing I worked fewer hours than I did. I was too loyal. But funny thing, I totally called it and stuck around like a retard and waited for it to blow up. I, no joke, legit came home one day in march and said to my dad big changes were coming to the company and informed him that I for sure had the job until May and then who knew.... well had the job until may then fired "laid off." At that point I was mad and asked her to pay me for all the things I bought for the office. She said to give her the receipts. It took me a few days but when I got her copies of the receipts, sent via email, she said "who authorized you to make these purchases, who said they would refund you" so I went back and collected my office supplies.

I feel like I don’t give a shit about her financial problems, and that she owes me. But nothing that I can do about it, but she is on the list of people I never want to talk to again. Even though I did offer to help out with billing if she needed it, but now she is promptly blocked from contacting me... so suck it.
After I got fired, call it what it is, 4 of coworker contacted me to start credentialing applications for their private practices. So there are at least 4 of them that are leaving in the next year, and one that started looking for a new job the day I got fired (and found one).

Help me thru the things I cannot change, help me forgive those that don’t deserve, help me get over the anger.

Say one thing and mean your mother

I re read my post from August. AUGUST. I sucked so bad at that contract I was assigned to my boss asked if I wanted to trade her contracts. I said yes. She them told me to take a while to think about it. I said "okay. Umm. Yes. You've never complained when I help you with your contract but I get talked to weekly about how I'm working on mine. You can have it back."

Now I'm working on the new contract and I think she just likes picking fights becuase now I feel like she is really looking into every detail to pick at something weekly with the contract im on now. For reals??? Get over your menopause. How do you nicely tell someone to back off?

Also same job since I'm takin off Tuesday's she was nice enough to ask if financially I'll be fine with having less hours? I said I don't know but I'll let you know if it becomes a problem. Now on top of motivating myself to do my homework and tests I have to penny pinch. 

I also did not do as well as I gave myself credit for on paying off my loan. What I made all last year was enough to pay off my loan in its entirety with a bunch extra to spare!! How could I have been so stupid?

What happened

I use to write on this often .... Now, not so much. Hummmm. I'm not really super busy, not as much as I'd like to think I am anyway. I have a huge list of things I need to accomplish at work. It seems like seems like anytime I complete a task on my to do list from work four more things or added, so I always feel like I'm drowning our over whelmed. This semester I'm taking calculus three ... again. Online this time, because I don't like getting up early early in the morning and so I didn't want to take a class that was earlier than 10 o'clock and across town because I didn't want to drive in the traffic. Bleh. so it's online and I feel so far the homework is pretty easy, I just have to get motivated to sit down actually do it. My first test is coming up as well on February23rd. It's online as well although it's time that I have to turn in my "proven work" via scan the same day the test is due, so I have to probably take the test ealry,then go to my work and scan it in to my teacher. I should to take the test early anyway because I'll be in South Carolina on the day that it's due and it's no fun to do homework on vacation. I'm doing my best to motivate myself in every way possible to get all of the homework done and the test taken before I leave for vacation. I've decided to start taking Tuesdays off from work so that I can get this done. Tomorrow being my first Tuesday off I have hours of homework planned. I hope to accomplish more than I have on my to do list. And at the end of my day as a reward to myself my dad and I have screening tickets to see "kingsman". Just have to get to the screening early and sit around doing nothing for a few hours to make sure we get a seat. I'll bring my homework to that as well. Might as well it'll give me something to do while waiting for two hours for the movie. :)

My friend recently sent me this picture on messenger.