The cold last week is still affecting us this week at work, and I don't like it. Normally, everything just rides along a smooth train track, we don't even think about how important electricity is, but power and energy really make the world today what it is. The goal was to get everyone past those impressively cold temperatures we experienced for one weird week, I find it hard to believe that a week later here I sit with the air conditioner back on, it was too muggy last night.
But anyways, to survive last week, the power to our site was turned off. As I heard, power to most large manufacturing sites was turned off, which was at that moment a good idea, all that equipment does use a lot of power. The kicker is this week, we are having all sorts of issues we aren't used to dealing with. One of our tools arced and almost killed a guy while he was trying to start it up, he said he was looking in the cabinet underneath where the pumps and guts to the tool are and the sparks shut out inches from him, ughhh. I am glad he is okay. As a result, we are down to one analysis tool for awhile with a backlog of work because we didn't process anything for a week.
The imaging tools were also having a hard time coming back up, these tools stay on 24x7, most of the year, only getting turned off to get serviced very rarely, even then, if vacuum can be left on, if it is just a software issue or something external, then the vacuum doesn't even get turned off.
I came in Monday night, assuming the dayshift people had been in and I was told to go ahead and run qual wafers through a tool that somebody turned on during the day. This was about the only thing I could do Monday which I was fine with, but nobody told me that no one else had been in. I thought the dayshift crew had been in and washed everything down, after the pumps and filters have been off, it is a good idea to wash and wipe everything down because as you know dirt and stuff crawls around even in a clean house. After running my quals, being all proud to know I contributed my small part while our analysis tool spent an extra night running under vacuum, they kind of got after me for not wiping everything down. My only excuse is no one told me I was the first one there and I had to do that. I assumed that since the tools had been turned on by someone, they had wiped stuff down and there was a guy in the lab, the one that almost killed himself, he works for the other company we share the lab with, and he was running samples on our analysis tool, he determined the tool needed to run under vacuum longer. He was qualifying the water supply sitewide to release us to get back to manufacturing and that was important, but if he was prepping samples, shouldn't he have been wiping and cleaning during the day?
All's well that ends well, no real harm done, I just don't like when I "make a mistake." I assumed the two guys that were supposed to be there during the day had been, I don't see them normally so it wasn't out of the ordinary for me to come into a quiet lab. If the tools are going to be brought up, shouldn't it be assumed that the person doing it would also give it a wipe down? I did change the chemicals it uses to process wafers on it because I figured those were the same ones there from before the tools were powered down. I'm not making excuses just clearing my conscience because I try to do everything correctly while being efficient. I am not going to voluntarily wipe everything down if it has already been done, I like to move along. My efforts are always to give the customer the data he needs, I prioritize moving product through the night. I like to think I am the elves in the story of the cobbler and the elves where every morning he would awaken and all the shoes would be made through the night.
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