It only happens once a year or so, but occasionally I do mess up at work. This week I was called out and I hate the feeling. How do people that mess up daily handle the negative energy, the "you let me down" feeling? I feel like a piece of crap, unworthy of my salary, not that I'm returning it. Wife says I don't know how to get over shit fast enough, but when you never get negative feedback, it is a weird sensation to be accused of being less than great.
The job itself was simple enough, make 1 cut on two separate samples, measure the layers seen and move along. The samples were tiny, first of all, maybe 2mm cubed. There was a definite sharpie mark on the first one, the second one kinda looked like a mark, possibly a scratch. I should have spent more time figuring this part alone, and I might have spare myself the scolding, but after looking at them for a couple minutes under the regular microscopes, I loaded the sample into our tool which can cut on the surface, exposing new faces which are clean and free of smudges. Maybe I should have spent an hour on each piece, but after making my first cuts, the sample was still unclear to me. The layer of material that I put down to protect the surface from the beam which cuts it, measured exactly what they were expecting the layers underneath to measure. I didn't agree with that, so I redid the work with a different material, to double check my work, I did a third site with yet another protective material. The second sample I loaded sideways, but I didn't realize it. There was a sharpie mark to mark the top, but the samples were the size of a grain of rice, and once I finished with S1, I was unsure and just wanted to get done with the job. I spent the same amount of time battling the samples and concluded that either the two samples were very different or I had gotten confused. Another distraction was the tool decided it needed to be heated. About once a week, the beam randomly shuts down and we have to put the tool to sleep for a half hour or so, and when we wake it, it goes through a heating cycle. This is most irritating, because we never know when, the tool just says heat me in a couple hours, sometimes that means a couple minutes, it'll shut itself down.
The whole heating thing probably cost me an hour or so, it always does, and at the start of the shift I probably killed another hour procrastinating since it did not appear to be much work. It should have taken three or four hours, maybe half the shift with all the little mishaps, I honestly don't know how I lost the whole night and didn't get it done. I keep feeling like I need some time off, Thanksgiving is two weeks away, and although I hesitate, I will probably take a week off during christmas, some time away from here might do me good.
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