damn STBs (ii)

got home at 10.40pm tonight. earliest i’ve ever been home since starting my day shift. so, today was a busy day. although to say it was busy is an understatement. a few things happened today. firstly, STB installation. it’s done. sort of. one more STB left. but that can’t be helped. there was only 4 of us today. CL, S, M and myself.

heh. was a bit pissed off at MK earlier. ever since L told S that i’m not supposed to do error recovery alone as i’m not certified yet, S hasn’t been handing stuffs for me to do alone. apparently, MK didn’t know that. so today at 10am, MK handed me his MU and asked me to handle operations as he wanted to “help” in STB installation. truth is, he just didn’t want to handle operations. moreover, he’d be handling operations alone as me, S and M had to do the installation work.

when S told him that i’m not allowed to go alone yet, MK grudgingly took back the main pager and the MU. however, at 11am, he handed me the MU again and said he’s going for lunch. no choice then. had to handle operations. thank goodness there was no errors at all. i thought that was the end of that. guess what? at 4.30pm, he said he’s going for his tea break. and who’s the one who had to cover again? me. at 5.50pm, all hell broke loose. an OHT vehicle broke down at the central overhead track of the fab. when a vehicle breaks down or hangs at that track, it’s like a car suddenly broke down in the middle of the PIE. a massive jam lasting over 20mins occurred.

wouldn’t have been that bad actually had i known what to do. but because i had to go and look for S to help, that vehicle caused a few near collisions and that took the whole track down. heh. thank goodness we managed to get it solved before any other major stuffs happened.

and then came a surprising news.

so far, i’m not satisfied with what i’m doing. then again, all i have been doing is just error recovery.

i wrote the above in a previous post. guess what? think the MAN up there heard me and decided to play a little game. as of next week, i’m no longer doing hallway error recovery. i’ll be doing automation helpdesk and support. basically, i become an engineer’s lackey.

heh. actually, the truth is, i’m going to do software support. it’s more like an engineering assistant thingy. like i’ll handle stuffs ranging from SQL problems to software application bugs, etc. more often than not, after the initial round of troubleshooting, i’m supposed to escalate the stuffs to the duty engineer. the troubleshooting step is just so that the engineer has one less step to do.

engineer’s job for a technologist’s pay. someone’s getting shortchanged here and it’s not the company!