Real Things
Jun. 11th, 2010 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynIn 1990, I had a summer job at IBM. I worked on the assembly line in a wafer-manufacturing plant. “Wafers” were shiny round discs about the size of a CD but much thinner; they are eventually turned into computer chips. They were insanely fragile and insanely valuable. When I say “assembly Line”, I am being metaphorical. There was no line, no conveyor belt. There was a gigantic “clean room”. Before entering it, everyone had to suit up in outfits vaguely reminiscent of hazmat suits. They weren’t for our protection but for that of the wafers, which could be easily ruined by dust, dirt, stray hairs, flakes of human skin, etc.
For most of my ten or twelve weeks there, I manned a single station in a back corner of the clean room. People would wheel up boxes of wafers to me. I would pick them up with a pen-sized wand that ended in a vacuum tip to clamp the back of the wafers, and load them into a big domed contraption on a mechanical arm. Then I’d push the arm into a machine that looked a bit like an oven and disconnect the dome inside of the machine, and turn the machine on. The machine spent twenty minutes coating the wafers with a micro-thin layer of aluminum. While it did that, I’d unload a second dome that had already been through the “oven”, load the second dome so it’d be ready to go in, and wheel the processed wafers off to their next destination. It was important to be careful. If a wafer broke while it was in the machine, all the wafers inside it would get bits of the broken one on it and they’d all be ruined. If you forgot where you were in the cycle and accidentally ran the same wafers through the machine twice, they’d all be ruined. I don’t think I ever did those. I’m pretty sure I did break a wafer or two. That happened to everyone.
It was a very simple job. I remember it being at once tedious and soothing. I often had ten or twelve minutes between loading and unloading while the wafers were getting coated, and I’d entertain myself by drawing cartoons and writing bits of stories in blue pen (pens were allowed in the clean room) on wax paper sleeves (ordinary paper was not). Some times I didn’t want to draw or write, and I’d just sit, bored and waiting for the next dome to finish, for my shift to end.
For all that it was dull, in its way I really liked that job. I was making something. Yes, I was a tiny mindless cog in an enormous machine. No, I didn’t even know what the significance of my station was, why the particular micro-thin layer of aluminum that I put on the discs mattered or how this helped to turn them into computer chips. But I trusted that it did. Maybe it was tedious and easy and anyone could do it, but it was nonetheless important that somebody do it. It was part of the process that made computers. It mattered, in a concrete and measurable way.
For the last thirteen years, I’ve worked for a bank, doing what is technically referred to as Loan Stuff. I do not make loans. I do not produce the documentation for loans. I do not do filing and I do not process payments. I do Stuff.
I write reports, quite a bit. I am much better at my job than my predecessor was, and not quite good enough at it to do it well. It is surprisingly hard to do it well. Numbers are slippery things and they keep trying to elude me when I total them or categorize them. I check for errors in our system and I fix them. When a loan officer or a customer or another member of my department asks “Why did this happen?” I am the one who explains it.
If I think about it, this is important work too. I believe in the value of the banking system, of letting individuals and businesses lend the bank money (in the form of making deposits to checking, savings, and CD accounts) so that the bank can lend the money to individuals and businesses to buy homes and cars and expand operations. I believe in using money to make money, in lending people some capital so that they can get things that are useful to them in making or saving money so that they can pay you back. With interest. So that everyone is better off in the long run. And I am part of this large operation that does these things. I am the part that makes sure we are doing it correctly and in accordance with the agreed-to terms. I make sure our directors have complete and accurate information about what we’re doing. I help auditors and regulators understand the state of my bank. This is all as much a part of the process of putting capital to work as putting a micro-thin layer of aluminum over wafers is a part of the process of making computers. Except that my part in the process at the bank is far more complex and much less routine and automatable. Some times it’s even less tedious.
Yet sometimes I miss that summer manufacturing job. I miss making something real, and not just pushing pixels around to make something as intangible as an idea.
For most of my ten or twelve weeks there, I manned a single station in a back corner of the clean room. People would wheel up boxes of wafers to me. I would pick them up with a pen-sized wand that ended in a vacuum tip to clamp the back of the wafers, and load them into a big domed contraption on a mechanical arm. Then I’d push the arm into a machine that looked a bit like an oven and disconnect the dome inside of the machine, and turn the machine on. The machine spent twenty minutes coating the wafers with a micro-thin layer of aluminum. While it did that, I’d unload a second dome that had already been through the “oven”, load the second dome so it’d be ready to go in, and wheel the processed wafers off to their next destination. It was important to be careful. If a wafer broke while it was in the machine, all the wafers inside it would get bits of the broken one on it and they’d all be ruined. If you forgot where you were in the cycle and accidentally ran the same wafers through the machine twice, they’d all be ruined. I don’t think I ever did those. I’m pretty sure I did break a wafer or two. That happened to everyone.
It was a very simple job. I remember it being at once tedious and soothing. I often had ten or twelve minutes between loading and unloading while the wafers were getting coated, and I’d entertain myself by drawing cartoons and writing bits of stories in blue pen (pens were allowed in the clean room) on wax paper sleeves (ordinary paper was not). Some times I didn’t want to draw or write, and I’d just sit, bored and waiting for the next dome to finish, for my shift to end.
For all that it was dull, in its way I really liked that job. I was making something. Yes, I was a tiny mindless cog in an enormous machine. No, I didn’t even know what the significance of my station was, why the particular micro-thin layer of aluminum that I put on the discs mattered or how this helped to turn them into computer chips. But I trusted that it did. Maybe it was tedious and easy and anyone could do it, but it was nonetheless important that somebody do it. It was part of the process that made computers. It mattered, in a concrete and measurable way.
For the last thirteen years, I’ve worked for a bank, doing what is technically referred to as Loan Stuff. I do not make loans. I do not produce the documentation for loans. I do not do filing and I do not process payments. I do Stuff.
I write reports, quite a bit. I am much better at my job than my predecessor was, and not quite good enough at it to do it well. It is surprisingly hard to do it well. Numbers are slippery things and they keep trying to elude me when I total them or categorize them. I check for errors in our system and I fix them. When a loan officer or a customer or another member of my department asks “Why did this happen?” I am the one who explains it.
If I think about it, this is important work too. I believe in the value of the banking system, of letting individuals and businesses lend the bank money (in the form of making deposits to checking, savings, and CD accounts) so that the bank can lend the money to individuals and businesses to buy homes and cars and expand operations. I believe in using money to make money, in lending people some capital so that they can get things that are useful to them in making or saving money so that they can pay you back. With interest. So that everyone is better off in the long run. And I am part of this large operation that does these things. I am the part that makes sure we are doing it correctly and in accordance with the agreed-to terms. I make sure our directors have complete and accurate information about what we’re doing. I help auditors and regulators understand the state of my bank. This is all as much a part of the process of putting capital to work as putting a micro-thin layer of aluminum over wafers is a part of the process of making computers. Except that my part in the process at the bank is far more complex and much less routine and automatable. Some times it’s even less tedious.
Yet sometimes I miss that summer manufacturing job. I miss making something real, and not just pushing pixels around to make something as intangible as an idea.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 08:14 pm (UTC)I think it's a good thing, personally. And yet I understand the wistful attraction of making something tangible. I rarely spend time in my little shop in the garage, but on the occasions that I did, the results were often very satisfying. A simple stand, or table, or something of use ... something made.
The US's manufacturing base has been declining for half a century. It has been globalizing, or is being outsourced, depending on your choice of terms. The replacement was service, then information technology -- as you put it, "pushing pixels around to make something as intangible as an idea."
Even that has been going the global route in recent years, as have other parts of the service economy like telephone work. It makes me wonder: What will be left, when the process completes?
It seems to me that as various "cheap labor" countries improve their lives due to that status, and become a little less cheap, capitalism will spill over to other places and the tide will lift them as well. Eventually, in a distant future, there won't be cheap labor elsewhere, and manufacturing (if anyone remembers how to do it!) can thrive again in the US and in other places it largely disappeared from.
That does seem like a long time off. In the meantime, I encourage you to keep doing your intangible ideas; despite that label, I find them quite touching.
===|===========/ Level Head
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 08:31 pm (UTC)I think I'd feel more productive writing code or webpages or something than I do making reports and watching financial transactions. A program is a Real Thing, of a sort. In my mind. In a way that a loan or a report isn't.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 08:47 pm (UTC)But storytelling -- writing -- I'm finding to be satisfying as well. At this moment, a retired army major in Oklahoma is reading through "Age of Octans" and commenting by little email chirps as he goes, so I know where he is in the story. I'm enjoying it through his eyes, and that's a lot of fun for me. And that creation feels like something tangible, even though it may never be formally published.
I can understand that the creation of a report wouldn't be quite the same -- but even so, a well-crafted report that puts the information together in very useful ways is itself something of a work of art.
The work you do is important, and helpful -- and you, particularly, put a lot more thought into doing it well than most people.
===|==============/ Level Head
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 09:15 pm (UTC)Until the robots come for us, of course.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 09:32 pm (UTC)In the film WALL•E, that's exactly the way it was -- though the people we saw tended toward chat rather than FPS games. Robots did everything from growing food to running the great cruise liner. There seemed to be no divisions into classes, and no power structures at all except a nominal captain who made morning announcements.
It could easily be considered an ideal life, if uninspiring. But I couldn't help but think that humans could have taken advantage of all that automation and done something more constructive. There's nothing that says that you can't invent things just because meals are brought to you for free.
===|==============/ Level Head
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 10:33 pm (UTC)I think the alternative is a scenario where people are low-value work units who do the jobs that they're comparatively less bad at because they were grandfathered in to the system.
Economic theory kind of supports that version of the dystopia -- like the example of country A that can make 20 units of food or 5 televisions per person, and country B that can make 10 units of food or 1 television per person. The optimal solution isn't 'make everything in country A', even if it's better at everything.
I guess if we're *really* lucky the comparatively less unsuitable jobs for people might be fun things like inventing new technologies and generating art and culture...
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 07:28 pm (UTC)But that's more an intellectual appreciation than a visceral one, is the problem.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 03:33 am (UTC)