Random School/Work-Venting Post

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Congrats DotW.

Just remember:
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely...but it rocks absolutely, too!

 

You're talking to SP's Encyclopedic definition of a chaotic evil mindset. Corruption? I don't think I have to fear that. I didn't had to step on anybody for this promotion, but I would have done it without a twinge of guilt. I was about to play the card of time working for the company to reclaim my shift which was given to a sub from the store we got a mutual work relationship with... stepping on someone would have been no problem, and truth be told, I would have gladly used the 300-pound powertrip as a stepping stone... but the problems take care of themselves, and here I am, first day on the second step of the ladder... time to move on to phase 2 of the master plan.

 

Got my annual review today. Overall, it was positive, but there was something going on that best qualifies as weird. It's like I was being sounded out for some reason.

 

FML...

Work is killing me. This past week was my long week (4x 12 hour shifts +6 additional hours of OT). Next week is supposed to be my short week (3x 12 hour shifts Turs, Fri, Sat)....but I'm working all day Monday since that shift has their yearly OSHA/FEMA/EHS training. I'm also working Tuesday because my new position requires 2 additional training classes (Radiation and Lock Out/Tag Out) that ERT/EMT employees don't need unless they're also in maintenance. I was also told by two different bosses that I was working on Wednesday to help swap 4 machines on two different platforms as well as upgrade one machine to accept 8" wafers.

Long week --> extra long week --> long week = FML!

The only plus side of all this is going to be lots of extra cash for my NY trip. Other than that, I see nothing except pain, sweat, exhaustion, and the first step towards 'burnout'.
Oh yeah, I might be MIA from here for the next two weeks or so.

 

I've been averaging around 80 hours a week in my current job, which I've been in for around 6 months. It's basically been 7 days a week, lots of 16+ hour days, and there is no end in sight. I'm definitely heading toward burn out.

I'll be letting my boss know tomorrow that if he doesn't let me hire someone new, I'm going to have to move on. They'll be somewhat screwed without me. I have really turned my area around. It was a total mess before I started. I knew the role was going to be challenging (which was one of the things that attracted me to it), but I never intended to sign my entire life away.

I don't usually share this kind of stuff in a public forum, but what the hell. I'm making an exception.

Now to get back to work....

 

Gotta work the next 13 days with only one day off with a royal b*tch of a coworker; you know, the one that likes to do her work really half*ss so you can in trouble for it. I really hate having to cover vacations.

 

I feel your pain. I had to suffer an entire weekend of my old duties (aka cash register) because my coworker (which happens to be my ex) wanted the weekend off.

 

The big boss at my plant (and #3 in the entire world-wide company) is really getting on a lot of people's nerves. He has now banned all 'listening devices' from the fab, and threatened severe disciplinary actions, including termination! I could care less since I don't use an Mp3 player in the fab...but he left the ban so vague, that radios in the fab might also be banned. Now that would suck for me since most of the bays I work in have radios that have some decent music playing. Also, we have a really nice radio in the wet shop, and an even better one in the maintenance shop.

This dude's never ending power trip is getting really annoying. He expects all the operators to work at peak performance, and for us techs to keep all the machines up and running...but at the same time he keeps taking away all these small perks that make working there for 12 hours at a time bearable.

---------- Added 0 hours, 16 minutes and 4 seconds later... ----------

Oh, and speaking of the maintenance shop, we had a *very* nice shop up until this past Friday. Computer stations, large work benches, testing equipment, good lighting, and lots of space. Well, we've been evicted. They're eventually going to be installing some sort of machine there...but they haven't even started installing the gas/power/exhaust lines...hell, the machine isn't even onsite yet.

They're apparently going to build us a new "better" shop, but right now that space is filled with several millions of dollars of junked machines accumulated over the past 30 years.

Right now, our current "shop" is a major OSHA violation since they've stuck us in two adjoining fire escape corridors with no airflow, crap for lighting, and no room to actually work on a machine. It's so small, you have to suck in your gut and walk sideways to get past someone else going the other way. -.-

 

My lazy colleagues are reluctant to do the dishes and clean up the mess they leave behind in the office kitchen. What did it for me was being able to observe a Lasagne in a sealed plastic box morphing from Lasagne to a rich culture of three-coloured fungus. Yuck. Since it is not my job to do other people's dishes, about a week ago I thus re-decorated the kitchen appropriately, along these lines:

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There has been a notable improvement in cleanliness since.

 

Kev ended up having to work yesterday... his day off. The person who was meant to be opening the store didn't turn up because she thought she had been fired by Kevs' boss after he had a massive go at her - she has epilepsy so shouldn't be left in a shop on her own in case she seizes. The boss had a rant at her on how she shouldn't have even applied for the job if she can't be left alone. Considering there are about six staff members, that should never be an issue.

However this is the guy who has told everyone in the shop he has six months left to live, nags at Kev saying his shop is terribly - then says he wants Kev to do really well in the company, has assigned too many work hours to the territory (Including two managers and over 35 man hours per shop) on a phone call yesterday Kev was told that his 'six months left' is complete bull. He's been in hospital for cancer treatment on days off, yet it's been taken as 'holiday leave' (which isn't the case for hospital and doctor appointments taken for your own person) and it's only the people in Kevs' shop who have heard six months, everywhere else has heard between "seven years" and "It's not terminal"

We were going to go into town yesterday to get me out the house and hand out CVs

 

Just got a phone call from work telling me I've been invited to be part of the trip organized by the company. Oddly, at first, I wasn't even supposed to go. Not that I'm complaining, this should be interesting.

 

/me screams random profanities...

Stupid arse engineers! Obviously working in a cube for 95% of the day completely rots your brain. The following conversation just happened before I went on break:

Process Engineer: "I need to run some wafers in <tool name>. What's it mean when it's grayed out?"
Me: "That means that chamber has been excluded. You can't use it."
PE: "Why?"
Me: "Because I have the chamber open."
PE: "Why?"
Me: "Because the operators logged it down to maintenance."
PE: "Oh......... Why?"
Me: (irritated) "Look it up on Workstream"
PE: "How do I do that?"
Me: (very irritated and shocked) "Seriously?!?!?"
PE: (blank look)
Me: "Forget it, I'm too busy to bother with you...come back in 30 min. If the chamber is still grayed out, wait another 30 min. Once I'm done, the operators will have to do a full QUAL (qualification tests (takes about 45min)) on it. After that I'll log it back up and you can have it.
ME: (I turn and walk off)
PE: "Why do they need to qual it before I can use it?"
Me: (really pissed off) "Patty, watch this guy so he doesn't F**K anything thing up while I'm behind the tool."
Patty: (laughs and shakes her head)
Me: (facepalm and walks off)

F***ING stupid engineers. The moron has no common sense. If I've got a chamber open, that means something's obviously wrong with it!

 

I Work in a car part warehouse. The system of the numbers is such that you can see from the number which model of car it is.

So when a person decides that a restyled version must have the same code as a total completely different car....

The overhead in claims, wrong ordering, wrong labelling....

 

Gah, yesterday I tasked someone to do a quick error check on four XML files - and it took her 7 hours (approx twice what's normally required), and when she then came along she said she found errors. I said 'Great, what have you found?' She replied that yesterday she was too tired to document them, so she'll have to search them again for me. WTF?

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What is the ****ing point of looking for them bloody errors when you don't ****ing document it? Moron!!!

Now, no matter how much I liked, I can't say that aloud because (a) she would start to cry and (b) it would not give me the result I need (since currently there is no one else who could do that particular job). So I told her that do I need a comprehensive list until noon, and that I'd greatly appreciate her writing down (or taking screen shots of, I am not picky, and that way there are less typos) errors 'right after when she sees them'.

 

Ugh...I spent all day working on two machines. Two...in a 12 hour shift. (5+ is average) The first one was handed off to me by night shift. After fighting with it for 8 hours, I gave up and left it for another one of the techs I work with to figure it out. (which they didn't)

Being frustrated, I responded to a page to take a look at tool that has known issues with its very existence...but they are easy to fix. Turns out the problem has a 50/50 chance of being a super easy fix....or a 6 hour ordeal. Yep, you guessed it...It decided to give me the 6 hour ordeal. What's really annoying is that tool is different than any other machine I work on, and I've only spent probably 2-3 hours with it in my many months of being a tech.

Today was not a good day.

 

I had to extract data from a large-ish 'Excel Database' where some previous moron user had found it expedient to cram various classes of information into single cells using Alt-Enter. Since the database was intended to be used for production it was a very idiotic (not to mention palpably lazy) thing to do; we needed the data clean.

The original proposal was to have a student type it into Access over a week. I objected on the ground that I am opposed to cruel and unusual punishment. Which effectively put the thing on my desk. I should have known.

I'd rather die on the cross than mindlessly type it into Access, not to mention that I don't have the time anyway. Since I couldn't simply export it to Access, I had to process it first. Good I know RegEx Since context retention was imperative, I processed it from Excel into my own DTD (first I ever wrote) and XML, while properly classifying the information into the respective elements, and then into Access. That was fun actually. The only problem I encountered was about encoding.

 

I did some work on a larger number of HTML files today (changing colours, table alignment, emphases, layout, some content etc. pp.) to get them in line with our shiny new 'corporate colours', using RegEx on the HTML code. I use PowerGrep for such work because it accepts UNIX standard RegEx, it's preview function and the very nice restore capability (important since it is easy to screw up things badly with RegEx). When you make a replacement operation, say on file xyz.html, it automatically generates a back-up, titled 'Backup_1_of_xyz.html', and then another one (Backup_2..., Backup_3... etc.) for each successive operation. Handy. So I was merrily working, when I spotted an error and wanted to restore to earlier version. No big deal. Well, it was. It didn't work. My back-ups were gone.

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After a phase of WTF, I ask around and eventually find said colleague, and she cheerfully told me she moved them to her desktop because she felt that they didn't belong in the folder she spotted them in. I explained that they definitely belonged there, since I put them there and that I do need them restored. She refused and insisted that, no, they didn't belong there because they were wrongly named - pointing out to me that they were beginning with Backup_n_of_xyz.htlm where only xyz.html was allowed She then went on to ask me why I had 'renamed the files'. I explained that I did not rename the files, but that I worked on them and that the program I used had created these back-ups. Puzzled look. I told her very slowly how PowerGrep's restore function works and that I. Do. Need. The. Back-Ups. In. Their. Original. Place. Now. and that eventually got the point across

It isn't that she couldn't have just asked if someone was working on the files before moving them, and why on earth to her bloody desktop, of all places (well, on a rainy day she might just have deleted them for the sake of order, so I count myself lucky)... she's one room away, and even then we have phone. And e-mail! And then there is walking and talking ... And she knew perfectly well that I was working on the project ...

People avoid having to work with her. Understandably so. She communicates on a meta-level that takes some time getting used to.

 

You don't use regexp to parse HTML. Doing so drives men insane

 

Aargh, you eventually found my desperate cry for help at stack overflow! You sleuth! Will I ever be able to hide anything from you?!

The response is ... interesting ... though.

 

Well...looking at next month's vacation calendar, I'll be working 5 days followed by 2 days off...and then 12 days straight.

On hand, that's going to be a lot of extra $$$...one the other hand, I think I might murder someone around day 10.