Seems like nothing of interest happened for the last five years, then all of a sudden, we have been in a thunderstorm of changes in the last couple months. I don't know if our company will survive in the same capacity once things settle down. I went back to work after being out for almost a month dealing with my discovery of cancer in my neck. I almost wish I had stayed home after the one day back, but I don't want to live on 60% of my normal take home pay.
First off, for our chemistry group, we had the lady that had trained me, and pretty much our floor leader, retire. She kept things going by being a whip of a worker, jumping from running the tool to cleaning the piles of collected boxes of wafers and other used up samples and generally doing all the little shit jobs to keep us moving forward in a smooth flow. Since she left, I have been given the task of keeping up with the used wafers and after being gone for a month, they are piled to the ceiling, I'll have to spend a couple hours sometime this week throwing away wafers and sorting things out. The other two guys that are left were also assigned some of her little duties, such as going and getting new chemicals about once a month, which we source from the fabs, washing and keeping track of the bottles a couple of our customers send us samples in, then disposing of the chemical leftovers we analyze for yet other customers.
Just as we were finding a flow for the remaining three of us plus our manager, I went and got sick, which sucked, but eventually I was going to return. In the meantime, this might have helped to break the camel's back as they say because while I was gone, our most senior chemist decided to take another job elsewhere, leaving just myself and the other guy that were in imaging just a few years ago to run day to day operations. This guy, our senior chemist has been looking for other opportunities for a long while, he was not happy that there weren't many chances to climb the corporate ladder. Add to that, we are still waiting for a promised bonus from last year, a cost of living increase and possibly a merit based raise. If our management had come through with these things, he might have sat comfortable for another year.
As it is, this lack of bonuses has now also caused our manager to turn in his two week notice. I heard of this last week and thought he might be looking for more money since so much is expected of him, but talking to him yesterday, he said all he was asking from our CEO was the promised things. We sat in a meeting last Fall and those things were discussed, I remember asking after the meeting "these are not theoretical ideas, we're going to get extra money for all we do?" Our CEO said yes, but here we are in March still waiting.
The other guy went and talked to our CEO after he heard our manager might be leaving and told him, if he leaves, you might as well disband the chemistry group, collectively, the two of us do not have enough knowledge to keep things going. I don't know if our CEO realizes how specialized the work is. Sure 50% or maybe more is the wafer stuff, we can more or less handle that. The rest of it is split between tools we don't even normally run, I've been trying to get time to learn how to run two of them, but I am kept busy with ICPMS, the normal stuff. Not only are there tools we don't run, but samples come in as clumps of dirt, pieces of iron ore and they'll want the concentration of Lithium or some rare metal. Some samples are just clumpy liquids, he's mentioned some are volatile and need to be heated to prep, but not too much, they could explode. I'm not fucking with any of that dangerous shit, risk blowing a finger or more off.
If our manager leaves, we are going to need a PhD level chemist who doesn't mind running samples, not sitting on his ass writing papers, which is going to be a hard find, I think. Maybe it's all a bluff, our CEO releases some money our way and things settle down, I don't know, the last couple of days I was still trying to get back to normal, we'll see what happens.
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