The well meaning assistance
(To protect the guilty parties I've decided to post this as AC. This is a tale about the support of semiconductor production equipment. Some of you might be able to guess who I am from that)
The research and development have been involved in a support call with a customer site for about 2 days. In which they promptly managed to break things badly enough to need replacement (R&D guys and hardware... I don't know how but they ALWAYS end up breaking things). Ofcourse, downtime in a semi-con fab is a matter of hundres of thousands if not millions of euros a day, so some people start getting nervous here. So late in the evening on a friday we get the call if one of our department can be on a flight to asia the next morning. 3 of us spent the entire evening hunting down people who know what is wrong, what type of machine it is, what type of parts we need, what spares we'll need, what spare-spares we'll take just in case, if we need special tooling for installation and qualification, how and/or what we need to qualify, what the deliverables are, etc. Because ofcourse everyone that could potentially have told us this knocked off 30 minutes before they tell US we need to do something...
Ofcourse we also had to fight tooth and nail to get those "just in case spares to spares" shipped because why would we need them? Then packaging everything in a way that'll survive the usual dropping off of trucks and throwing around that packages marked "Caution: Fragile" are usually subjected to.
Eventually my co-worker is on the plane the next afternoon. When he gets there he finds out just how stuffed they got the machine (well and truly stuffed) but miraculously we had managed to scrounge and scavange all the parts he'd need for the repair. The next day the parts arrive and first thing in the morning they are unpacked. Remember that part about these parts being very fragile? My co-worker starts neatly opening up one of the parcels while one of the fab-workers start on another package. A cleanroom product is always "double bagged". The outer bag keeps the contaminants from travel and package out, while the inner bag protects the part right up until it is about to be installed. The RIGHT way to open a cleanroom packaged product is to carefully cut off the outer layer of packaging while leaving the clean inside layer on until the part is about to be installed. This unnamed fab worker just RIPS all packaging off. Bending the legs on a rather fragile mechanism in the process. The mechanism he had just FUBARed was also exactly the stuff needed to get that machine up and running.
Some quick thinking and a lot of unsanctioned language and work methods later my colleague managed to frankenstein a working system out of the spare-spares we didn't need to bring, parts from the old mechanism and the broken new one.
The moral of the story: If the onsite support engineer tells you he'll need something, don't tell him otherwise. We tend to know what we are doing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
