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.