Quick Notes from Work

Here's what I attempted to post yesterday morning, but was unsuccessful in that I was not able to access blogger:

Having completed almost everything needed for the next phase of of work to begin, tensions are running high at work right now.  I can't really explain it (without giving too much away) to most people other than to say this is a server's version of sea trials for the first of a new kind of ship.  We are doing everything we can to break it, and verify the longevity of the design in that process.  For this particular phase, we have just let the vessel into the water for the first time

The majority of my role has been to prepare our lab for for a few different versions of the ship to be tested.  We have set up many, many test stations for teams of many disciplines to work their magic and hopefully identify any problems before they would make it into the hands of our customers.

The bad part about all of this is that I've been working longer hours and so have had less face time with the family.  The part that might be good is that I have been being introduced as the lead technician for our lab (something that has been in question for quite a while).  I'm hoping that waiting around these many years might yield my second promotion.  It has only been about 8 years and 9 managers (okay, one of them got counted twice) since my first one.

Many people ask what I do for a living.  My usual answer is to laugh and say "Pretty much whatever I want," but the truth is that I usually have so much to do that I can afford to pick and choose the tasks I do.  There are many different disciplines at Intel, some that may not seem at first to have anything to do with what you might think we would have any need for, but Intel is not only sneaky that way, but they want to make the most of any opportunity that might come up.

Here are some of the things I do:

1. General clean-up and organization of the lab.
2. Specific organization of the lab (labeling and tracking items/locations of interest).  I have attempted for a LONG TIME to implement a PDA/server based scheme of asset tracking that has a lot of fans, but I've never been able to get enough traction from my "team" of managers for various reasons (usually too many fires to put out) to actually put it into play on a wider scale.
3. Rework Middle Man.  I used to do rework (solder/desolder of boards & components), but have been given a decent supply of folks who ONLY do rework to do that for me.  When an engineer comes along with a need for rework, but lacks the specific skills to "dumb down" the instructions so that somebody can comprehend the work without performing a Vulcan Mind Meld with said engineer, that's where I come in.  I can usually see well enough into the clouds to see what work is needed, and then I can use what talent I have to manipulate the board design tools to make pretty pictures to allow any monkey that can weild a soldering iron to do the work properly.  I'm REALLY good at this for two reasons: As a rework technician, I hated having to hold a piece of paper up to the light X-Ray style to see the work needed in the right orientation (when you look at a picture of the bottom of a board, it is backwards because you are actually looking through the top to see it), and I have lots of experience using the board design tools (because I've been on a few board design teams).
4. Plumber.  Maybe that sounds funny, but I am a plumber of sorts.  In the Navy I was introduced to chilled water loops and water cooling for electronics.  At Intel, I get to use the same priciples to control the temperature of all kinds of chips.  And because so many others have tried and failed at this, I am now The Man.
5. Firefighter.  Not in the conventional sense, but in the sense of taking on big "high priority" jobs that need to be handled with a minimum of hand-off time.  My depth and breadth of experience seems to have made me a prime target to throw into the fire.
   
6. Researching and entering purchase requests.  When one of our engineers or our "lab manager" needed something, I used to be able to actually make purchases on my own, but because we now have a dedicated team for purchasing, I only have to go so far as to find out how much something (or things) cost, which really means I'm a half step away from completeing the purchase, then I send a request to my manager, who likes to find some reason to change the request.  After my manager approves, I get to copy and paste the request into a tracking tool that helps our purchasing team to do their job.  Hopefully, we end up getting the right stuff.
7. General Consultant.  As I've done almost everything there is to do around our labs, there are a lot of people who use me as a handy reference when they are wanting to make improvements.  I've made a number of suggestions to make our thermal tools safer and more efficient, suggesting design improvements as well as offering other advice.

So as you can see, I have options every day.  The trick lies in not getting too fed up with any one of them.

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