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TIFU by breaking a $10,000 part at Work

Today looked to be a standard day at work.

I work in a cleanroom fab where my company manufactures semiconductors on 200mm silicone wafers. It's an highly iterative process that requires fine tuned machines, specific airflow, and a multitude of different processes that do different things to the wafer. It's incredibly important that the environment and the machines necessary to do the job are in proper condition. These wafers are worth a ton of money, a full set of 25 can have a value of high 5 figures to low 6 figures easy. That means the machines that make them need to be in the best condition, which means regular preventative maintenance. That's where I come in. I'm a maintenance technician for my area that works on the tools to make sure they're in proper working order.

I won't go into too much detail, but there's a certain toolset that's easy enough to manage but if you're not careful certain parts can break very easily. That's what happened with me. There was an error on a chamber that my lead wanted me to check out. I went over to the tool and saw that some parts went bad. I've worked on these chambers countless times for regularly scheduled preventative maintenance so I figured since I was there, I might as well replace the parts. I accidentally slipped while trying to remove the fragile parts and ended up breaking an edge ring where the wafer would sit during process. This part was no longer a foot in diameter an a few millimeters thick and is incredibly brittle. This part costs $10,000 to replace.

I was already under some stress this week due to another mistake I made a couple days ago during the last 15 minutes of my shift. I didn't help that my area was understaffed and we've had a lot going on this week. My lead isn't upset, he didn't even expect me to open up the chamber just to note that we were looking into it. We have too much going on right now and need to prioritize other work.

This week has not been my week at all. This is my last day here this week however so in another 6 hours I can finally take my leave and come back renewed not to make these kinds of mistakes again.

TLDR: While working I ended up slipping which caused me to break a $10,000 part for something I didn't actually need to work on in the first place.

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