The cost of RAM...
I work in a semiconductor plant, where we manufacture RAM that goes into everything from computers to cell phones to your Xbox.

To manufacture these things, you start out with a wafer of extremely pure silicon, with as close to a perfect crystalline structure as can be managed. (Give you an idea of how perfect: if you break a wafer, it usually splits along lines that form 60 degree angles, because all of the atoms line up in a hexagonal structure. I shit thee not.) These wafers are only about a millimeter thick, so they're extraordinarily fragile. By the time a full lot of wafers (25 wafers in a lot) makes it through to the point where it's ready to be cut up into individual little boards of RAM, each wafer has had about $1800 of work invested in it, so one of these lots is worth about $45,000. These wafers are 20 cm across- about 8"- so a full lot fits in a box about 12" on a side, and the lot, the cassette holding the lot and the box together weigh about 8 lbs. (The box is shown on the left; inside said box is the cassette with the wafers, on the right.)



You know how they say that familiarity breeds contempt?

I've seen guys pick up these boxes by the corner with one hand to carry them across the room. And I've seen them carry two at a time this way.

To put it in perspective: if that box's latches fail and it opens, or if the box slips out of his hand, $45,000 is instantly lost. If this goober trips and drops both lots, that's $90,000. That's the equivalent of paying three of the manufacturing associates for a year to not even be there. That's a fully loaded Porsche. That's half of a mortgage on a decent house.

And these clowns carry them around like bowling balls.

Another good one: because it's a Class 1 cleanroom environment, everyone has to wear a cleanroom suit, sometimes called a bunny suit, which covers every bit of you except your eyes and nose- and you have to wear safety glasses, so it's really just your nose. To give you an idea of what it looks like:



(This is not our plant, but that's pretty close to what it looks like up there.)

Since even wearing perfume can cause problems with the wafers, they're ultra paranoid about any sort of contamination, so there are no bathrooms in the factory. Gotta take a piss? You have to walk out to the gowning room, take off the suit and walk out of the factory to get to the bathroom. It takes a good ten minutes to get there, and another ten to return- so you don't do it often.

Some of the associates have gotten very sneaky and pissed down through the grate floor into the lower area of the factory where the things like the canisters of hydrogen gas and other chemicals and the slurry pumps and whatnot are. What one guy didn't realize, though, was that the place he chose to piss was right next to one of the ion implanting machines. He was in fact pissing right next to the power supply for the machine. A 480V, god-knows-how-many-amp power line. Had he hit it, the current would have gone straight up the stream, up through his urethra, vaporized the contents of his bladder and kidneys, and blown his crotch apart like a pinata.

I sometimes regret that he missed. It would have made for a great Darwin Award.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 28 Sep 2007, 20:02, Reply)