The Thyroid Rises / My First Mistake
Nearly two weeks ago, my new health insurance kicked in and I saw a primary care doctor for the first time in years. We did some blood work and when the results came in the mail, I freaked out a little. Everything appears to be okay with what they measured except for my thyroid hormone levels. A normal person has a thyroid level of between 0.5 and 5 points. My result was 10 points. I have an appointment to see the doctor again this Tuesday.
The thyroid level being high like this means that my thyroid gland is under-functioning. Cause? Dunno. Solution? We'll find out tomorrow. I'm worried it'll involve a pill every day and weekly blood tests for the rest of my life, as is the typical treatment I've been reading about online. But I've been trying not to get myself worked up. The doctor will know best what the results mean and what my options are. I also learned that being at ten points isn't that big a deal since I've read about people being up over four hundred. This new potentially permanent illness, coupled with the gut pain I've been living with since February, is only giving me anxiety at the moment. If I don't start getting solutions to these problems, I'm gonna find a new doctor. Tomorrow had better be the beginning of the end of all this. More on that in a forthcoming post!
So I had my first mistake at work where a product wafer was feared destroyed. For about a month now, I've been training on a new set of machines and learning the ropes. My trainer isn't bad at training, she just isn't very good at it. Instead of getting the fundamental instruction I require, we always only seem to have time for operating the machines. This is a classic case of management desiring to have someone train on too many machines at once too quickly and with a trainer who already has a full time job to perform. So it's been a challenging and rough several weeks.
What happened was I was unloading wafers from a machine that I thought had finished processing. The PC that runs the machine said the lot was done. I then began staging the next lot of wafers but they were destined to run a different recipe on the machine. The moment I put the new lot on the thing, it took a single wafer and began processing it under the old recipe, ruining the wafer (Or so I thought). My trainer rolls up and it was a confusing few minutes as we tried to unravel what happened. Sure enough, I had neglected to check the machine itself to see if it was done with the old lot. The way that stupid thing is programmed, it'll just process whatever you put on it unless it specifically displays that it's done with the old lot. Forget what the PC says. My trainer initially reassured me and tried to tell me to forget about it. It was just one wafer, after all. Could have been worse. Everyone scraps. Still, my mood was shattered. I had thought my perfect record of never ruining even a single wafer was gone.
The next day when I got in, I had a quick informal chat with an engineer. We discussed what happened with the wafer. He told me that the wafer had actually been saved during the day shift by a process tech who said the wrong recipe was so similar to the right one that only a minor touch-up was required! WHEW! I still learned from the experience and that's all the engineer needed to hear. Case closed, back to work. Right about then, my trainer discovered the joys of publicly teasing me about the incident. She kept it up all shift -- especially behind my back to other people -- dramatically telling the story of how she swooped in and saved the other wafers from the silly trainee. In reality, we were both dumbfounded as it was going on. Everyone else, however, made me feel better by telling me their horror stories of entire lots of dozens of wafers they'd scrapped. It all made my story seem like nothing.
My trainer's teasing was tough to tolerate and although it's just a little mild ribbing on the occasion of my first almost-scrap, it is nonetheless salt on the wound. This is a job where every minor teensie-tiny mistake can end in immediate termination, so I was understandably shaken up. Hopefully this is all old news by the time we get back to work on Wednesday and that it's no longer fun for her to claim to be a hero. No one cared anyway and I even had a couple people come to me and ask what her issue was. And technically, she's responsible for not watching me during this training period, so she was in a position to prevent the whole thing. But you know, whatever. I just need to get through the training process, get certified and go back to my old machines.
The thyroid level being high like this means that my thyroid gland is under-functioning. Cause? Dunno. Solution? We'll find out tomorrow. I'm worried it'll involve a pill every day and weekly blood tests for the rest of my life, as is the typical treatment I've been reading about online. But I've been trying not to get myself worked up. The doctor will know best what the results mean and what my options are. I also learned that being at ten points isn't that big a deal since I've read about people being up over four hundred. This new potentially permanent illness, coupled with the gut pain I've been living with since February, is only giving me anxiety at the moment. If I don't start getting solutions to these problems, I'm gonna find a new doctor. Tomorrow had better be the beginning of the end of all this. More on that in a forthcoming post!
So I had my first mistake at work where a product wafer was feared destroyed. For about a month now, I've been training on a new set of machines and learning the ropes. My trainer isn't bad at training, she just isn't very good at it. Instead of getting the fundamental instruction I require, we always only seem to have time for operating the machines. This is a classic case of management desiring to have someone train on too many machines at once too quickly and with a trainer who already has a full time job to perform. So it's been a challenging and rough several weeks.
What happened was I was unloading wafers from a machine that I thought had finished processing. The PC that runs the machine said the lot was done. I then began staging the next lot of wafers but they were destined to run a different recipe on the machine. The moment I put the new lot on the thing, it took a single wafer and began processing it under the old recipe, ruining the wafer (Or so I thought). My trainer rolls up and it was a confusing few minutes as we tried to unravel what happened. Sure enough, I had neglected to check the machine itself to see if it was done with the old lot. The way that stupid thing is programmed, it'll just process whatever you put on it unless it specifically displays that it's done with the old lot. Forget what the PC says. My trainer initially reassured me and tried to tell me to forget about it. It was just one wafer, after all. Could have been worse. Everyone scraps. Still, my mood was shattered. I had thought my perfect record of never ruining even a single wafer was gone.
The next day when I got in, I had a quick informal chat with an engineer. We discussed what happened with the wafer. He told me that the wafer had actually been saved during the day shift by a process tech who said the wrong recipe was so similar to the right one that only a minor touch-up was required! WHEW! I still learned from the experience and that's all the engineer needed to hear. Case closed, back to work. Right about then, my trainer discovered the joys of publicly teasing me about the incident. She kept it up all shift -- especially behind my back to other people -- dramatically telling the story of how she swooped in and saved the other wafers from the silly trainee. In reality, we were both dumbfounded as it was going on. Everyone else, however, made me feel better by telling me their horror stories of entire lots of dozens of wafers they'd scrapped. It all made my story seem like nothing.
My trainer's teasing was tough to tolerate and although it's just a little mild ribbing on the occasion of my first almost-scrap, it is nonetheless salt on the wound. This is a job where every minor teensie-tiny mistake can end in immediate termination, so I was understandably shaken up. Hopefully this is all old news by the time we get back to work on Wednesday and that it's no longer fun for her to claim to be a hero. No one cared anyway and I even had a couple people come to me and ask what her issue was. And technically, she's responsible for not watching me during this training period, so she was in a position to prevent the whole thing. But you know, whatever. I just need to get through the training process, get certified and go back to my old machines.