DEMORALIZING

Back when I was a lowly cement mason I used to watch the weather pretty regular because there is not much worse that putting 2000 square feet of fresh mud on the ground right before it rains. Watching the weather was a futile endeavor in my part of the country because the weather people cant reliably tell me what happened yesterday let alone what’s going to happen today.

I eventually gave up watching the weather but not before fantasizing about how great it must be to have a job where you can be wrong and make mistakes 60% of the time and not only get paid but receive raises and bonuses.

My current job is as much art as it is skill. It’s a lot like being a TV weatherman in that I can get it wrong and still get paid. I grow specialized semiconductor crystals which eventually end up in some damned cool products including a space craft called New Horizons that will still be cruising the Milky Way galaxy long after our Sun burns itself out, incinerating the Earth in the process a few billion years from now.

One of the tools I use is a high precision temperature controller. We only use about 1/10th of one percent of the features this controller offers but we have to navigate nearly the entire menu system to access the features we do use.

So last night, after a shitty night the night before where I had to melt back a ten hour old crystal and start over, I reach a point where the crystal is becoming sharp and it spontaneously starts to grow a dendrite. This is fairly common and I wasn’t concerned until I fat fingered a menu item in the temperature controller setting up a runaway temperature increase that I did not know was possible and had no idea how to correct.

My immediate concern was for the crystal itself but this machine runs at close to 600 degrees Celsius and contains a number of water jackets to keep things stable. However, proper crystal growth conditions require the main water jacket to run at 87 degrees C which only leaves a 13 degree margin of safety before a steam explosion becomes part of your future. Steam explosions kill people…..mmkay.

So I’m freaking the fuck out hammering away at menu options like a crazed piano player, trying to regain control by fixing whatever I had done wrong. The temp is increasing at one full degree every ten seconds. Every option I try is not working. My final “Hail Mary” option will in all likelihood ruin the crystal but I decide that is better than death or having my skin melt off so I do it and the temp immediately starts to crash.

Now I’m hammering away at menu options again trying to stabilize the temp where I need it to be but it undershoots by a wide margin. I finally get the controller doing what I need it to do but it’s moving at a snails pace so I take a peek at my old friend Mr Dendrite in the growth chamber and my guts churn so much I want to puke.

Our crystal rotates in one direction and our quartz crucible filled with molten rare earth metals rotates the opposite direction. A dendrite is just a small corner of the crystal that cools too quickly, solidifies and starts growing outward toward the crucible wall. If the dendrite reaches the crucible wall it causes the seed to break and the crystal falls into the pool of molten metal making a royal mess and ruining your day.

Turns out my dendrite was growing far faster than I could keep up with and the crystal crashes into the molten metal just as I look in the window. FUCKITY FUCK FUCK! Ten hours of prep time, forty hours of finicky, nearly impossible work by my boss and myself plus $60k worth of ultra high purity rare earth metals is all gone in big, shiny splash!

I’ll still get paid, (overtime no less) and I’ll probably get another bonus or two before year end. Having a job like a TV weatherman where I get to be wrong more often than right and still get paid is most definitely not great! It’s just fucking demoralizing!