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.