Friday, October 20, 2006
Job #12: Texas Instruments Clean Room
N decided to move back to Arizona to get her PhD and I decided to move back with her. While living in Chicago it had become a source of strain on our relationship that I spent so much time rehearsing and performing improv and so little time working towards anything resembling a lasting career. Moving back to Arizona, I thought, "Well, I can use this time to get my life together."
But there weren't many jobs in Arizona, and I ended up interviewing to work in a clean room making microchips for Texas Instruments. This is what the bulk of the interview involved: Six people who seemed desperate for work (myself included) put on full clean room gear. Face mask, goggles, hood, full body suit, two sets of gloves, two sets of boots. Then we were shown a half hour video about clean rooms, how a single fleck of skin can ruin thousands of dollars of microchip material. We had to stand, breathing into our facemasks for the length of the video. If you watched the whole thing without passing out, hyperventilating or sitting down, you were hired.
The first week on the job was classroom training on the dangers of the clean room. The biggest danger was, of course, chemicals. One chemical would not hurt at first, but would steadily burn deeper into your body. Another chemical would not only burn you but also, "slightly alter your D.N.A." Apparently your future children would carry some altered trait from the chemical.
I remember sitting there, hearing these things, half a country away from Chicago, where I wanted to be, in a relationship that was slowing falling apart, and thinking, "I'm just trying to make things work."
