6/10/16 How Much Time Does It Take You To Do What You Do Everyday?

    We have not been busy at work.  I am almost at the point of worrying, next week I am even going to train on a different toolset that is currently swamped with work.  I did get a "cute" email from my supervisor more so as a response for my cheeky response to her "what are you doing?" the first night our tool went down last week.  I maintain I am an honest and straightforward guy.  She asked what are you doing?, I am not going to fabricate busy work, I've been here almost twenty years and I am a good employee, if tool breaks it is not my fault or responsibility to get it fixed.  I said not much, drinking coffee, writing my daily blog, walking laps for exercise, texting a couple friends.  She was not amused by my answer, and then assigned me what felt like busy work, but that is fine.
    Today, I came in to her email of "in one of your blogs can you talk about why I constantly have to remind you for hours on FIB jobs?"  I laughed, thought it was mildly clever and on point.  The truth is because I am on nights, I do a lot of the routine stuff and if it took three hours to do customer A's samples last month, it will probably take three hours to do customer A's sample this week.  We are already pretty efficient and all of us have been doing what we do for at least ten years, there aren't many new tricks to improve throughput, plus like I said, there hasn't been much work, so no reason to work in a frenzy.  I get her snippiness, specially when the customer wants the time allotted to close out said job, but in this example, sample was one I've done at least 50 times.  They take about three hours.  I might drag a little ass, or I might get distracted doing one of my many other side things I do, but the work on the sample still amounts to the same.
    So I have my marching orders, I will keep track of time spent on each sample.  Most customers pay by number of samples done in a month, but I guess, a customer could have set it up as charging by the hour.  A question I ask myself is "do I charge the full time?"  If I stop to go make coffee, or stop to go to the bathroom and then get caught up having a discussion or helping Redbull figure out what he is looking at, is all that time billable to the sample?  Probably not, but if I don't make coffee, I might fall asleep and then the sample would take even longer. 
    A couple years ago I started training in chemistry, another group we have here, and then we got busy in my section, TEM.  Before I knew it, I was back to normal and we went back to needing to work OT to keep up.  I am hoping magic strikes twice and by the time I am trained in GCMS, it will be time to come back home to TEM.

TEM images: (pulled from Google, I don't want to get in trouble ours is proprietary)  But we look at super tiny layers of materials.




Compare reality on wafers vs what engineers draw up, again very tiny structures.