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.