The Clean Room

I got the chance to visit a manufacturing clean room recently.  I didn't actually get to go in the clean room but I got to see it up close through windows and was introduced to the gowning area, where I got to try on all the garb.  I do love that phrase "gowning area."  Sounds like maybe a coronation is about to take place.  Except the reality of it is about a million miles from that.  This brief tour really left a mark on me.  

To prepare for entry into the clean room, you must

• Stick each foot in the shoe scrubber
• Wash and dry your hands
• Wear latex gloves
• Don a bouffant (hair net)
• Affix a veil around your head that hangs from just below the eyes down just past the neck
• Wear a hood that covers all the way down over your shoulders, executioner style
• Wear a full-length jumpsuit (following the correct protocol so the sleeves don't touch the ground while you step into it) that snaps at the neck, containing the veil and the base of the hood
• Step into calf-length "boots" that have their own rubber soles that affix by snapping over your shoes, with protective material that extends up over the calf and attaches with another snap around the leg

That's it.  You're now completely covered, from head to toe, with just a small horizontal space for your eyes.  Are your hands sweating from the gloves yet?

Now you work a 12-hour shift.  Hold on - don't panic just yet.  It might sound worse than it is.

But probably not.

The clean room itself is very large, but no one works the whole room.  In fact, you work in just one of many large hallways within the room.  Each hallway contains the large machine needed to complete one step of the process.  A worker is assigned to only one machine/hall, so that's where you spend your day.  The rows are maybe 10' wide and 60' long.  There are various carts full of bins and other racks of things lining the sides of the hallways.  It's all not too unlike a hospital ward.  Some of these hallways are lit with that similar antiseptic white light, but many of them are lit with a strange orange light.  There's certainly no trace of sunlight.  The sound like that of computer cooling fans surrounds you.  Not excessively loud but elevated and relentless.  No one seems to wear hearing protection, maybe because that would just be the last straw?  The temperature and humidity in the room are always exactly the same.  The net effect here is sensory deprivation.  

You yourself aren't really making the semiconductors.  All that work is microscopic.  It's all done by specialized machines.  Your job is to simply load the machine, and then unload it when it says it is done.  Then you hand off that piece of the puzzle to the person in the next row who feeds it into their tool and passes it off to the next person and so on.  It requires training but is essentially unskilled labor.  Some days you're quite busy and on your feet almost the whole time.  Other days you're doing a lot of sitting around in that ridiculous get-up trying to find ways to kill time while your rods and cones get oranged to oblivion.

I don't think humans are made to do this.  That having been said, it's possible it isn't quite as bad as it sounds.  I mean, it's pretty bad, but I can almost see how anyone even does it.  Within that 12-hour shift, you get two, paid, one-hour breaks.  An hour is a pretty long break.  It's sort of human.  You have the flexibility to take these breaks whenever you want (as coordinated with your co-workers.)  Ideally, you could work 4 hours, take a break, work 3 hours, break, and then finish up the final 3.  There's an exercise room on site.  You could also just leave for awhile and go see life.

But could you do that and, after seeing actual living humans out in the wild, still force yourself to go back to the clean room for your next 3 hours, or would you just walk?  It might help if you think you're providing the world with much needed semiconductor chips.  At least it might help for awhile.  

Still, employers know this world of sensory deprivation is out of the ordinary, and I imagine years of turnover have led them to create a schedule that helps these clean room workers keep their sanity.  Sorry for all the math here, but in this schedule there exists a time when you'll have 2 days off, 2 on, and then another 2 off.  The schedule is 2 on, 2 off, 3 on, 2 off, 2 on... so the worst it ever gets for you is 3 consecutive 12-hour days.  With the two, one-hour breaks thrown in there, the 12-hour day doesn't seem too bad, but when you consider you have to wrap yourself in some kind of polyethylene pita and walk up and down the same hallway for the entire waking day... it starts to seem a little... badder.

Burnout is a problem in these jobs.  I don't think it's just the hours.  It really can't be that healthy to wear that stuff all day every day.  That orange light has to mess with your vision.  The pay is pretty base-level, but it's a job that provides benefits (85% paid anyway) and it's a steady employer.  I think people stick with it for a certain amount of time until it catches up with them that humans really aren't meant to do this - or if at all, certainly not for very long.  It's borderline psychological warfare that eventually loses the borderline.

In this particular case I think it's good news that the employer is currently hard at work trying to replace all these employees with robots.  I'm sure the employer is enticed by the payroll savings and work advantages of not having to have live employees.  Carting items from one place to another, feeding those items into machines, waiting for those machines to finish... all sounds like something robots would excel at.  The company is focusing on a better bottom line, but in some strange twist, this phasing out of human jobs seems merciful.  It might appear to be in the best interest of the company, but what I see is one less cruel circumstance desperate workers have to be subject to.

Dystopia

 Okay!  We've hit that point in the cycle again where weight loss takes center stage!  These are exciting times and I know you, like me, are eager to get started and dive into the soul-crushing world of hunger and deprivation, so let's get to it!

Now that I have that pointless intro off my chest, lemme tell you, from years of experience with the weight loss yo-yo, what the hardest part of the process is.  

(I hope you didn't fall for that "hardest part" misdirection because right off the bat that could be your first mistake. Did you think there was just one hard part?  Nope!  But it isn't all bad.  Really.  Allow me to break it down into the sections as I've seen them.)

1) Starting

Starting is probably the hardest part.  That's the day you decide to break the habits.  It's the day you deprive yourself of the snack that you look forward to every day, which, if I can say it one more time, means you have to deny yourself something you look forward to every day, so there's going to be an immediate void.  Since you're on Day One, you don't yet have any progress or results to look back on.  That means all you have in this moment is disappointment; disappointment in your weight, and disappointment in this stupid, lousy day that doesn't have your favorite snack.  I don't have any advice on making it through this obstacle but I'm here to tell you, once you manage to give that stuff up, you actually get used to living without it pretty quickly.  

Sidebar: Keep in mind I'm a calorie-counter.

The only thing I focus on is my caloric intake,

and I aim for a pretty low number.  Within reason,

I don't worry too much about how I get there.

Although during the diet phase I cut out almost

all sugar, I still sometimes eat french fries and

some other things that aren't good for me.

But, my #1 rule is to make sure I don't exceed

my daily calorie limit.  French fry calories can

add up pretty fast, so if I eat them, I've got a

lot of other offsetting choices I need to make.

Also, I don't do any exercise beyond just staying

active.  I ride a bicycle and walk and do yard 

work, etc., but you won't catch me on a treadmill

or going for a jog.  I've noted before, all exercise

does is make me hungry and I've already got that 

well covered, thanks!

After just one week in, two major things happen.  First, you've established a new normal and, this can't be overstated, you'll start to see your new routine develop a path forward.  You settle into a groove, and the next few weeks won't feel like they require as much effort.  The other thing that happens after just one week is you feel just the slightest difference in the way your clothes fit.  Things are just a liiiiiitle less snug. You really need to key into this feeling and the momentum it carries.  The groove/path forward that you just established only brings more of this over the next few weeks.

  

2) Ten Weeks In

After about ten weeks of this goddamn bullshit you start to lose patience with being hungry.  You really start to tire of feeling famished and you just want to eat something and be happy.  Good luck with this stage. But, after ten weeks of eating sensibly and limiting your calories, you can easily have lost 10 pounds.  Not unreasonable to think you may have lost 15 pounds.  You also need to really key into this feeling and take some pride in your progress and results.  Hopefully that keeps you from throwing all that work away.

3) Those Last Five Pounds

No one has much sympathy for someone who says they really need to lose five pounds.  In fact saying that out loud is likely to get you punched.  In fact, it probably should.  Don't say it.  Those last five coming off won't likely make you look much different but, again, you'll feel it in the way your clothes fit.  Either way, you're so close.  Don't give up now.  You've come this far.  Finish it!

4) Finishing It

Now what?  No, seriously... Now what?  Now you're just thin forever, right?  You put in all the work and I guess you're done and that's it.  The truth to this is there's a glorious moment in achieving your goal weight where, just for a moment, you can eat whatever the hell you want and you're still thin.  There probably isn't a greater feeling in the world.  This moment lasts approximately 12 and one half seconds, then you turn around and march right back into the direction from whence you came.  

Slowly slipping back into the habits that got you in trouble is all too easy and subtle, and that's what makes it so hard to avoid.

I think the key from here on out is to get on a scale once a week and make a move as soon as you see it go up by 3 pounds.  Don't let it get to 5.  Good luck.  

Enjoy your success!  See you back at Step One real soon!

5 Years is Enough

 Here's, by far, the worst thing to come out of the pandemic; ring lights.  Damn those infernal things!  I'm sure you've seen them.  It's like a head-sized black plastic ring on a stand with a holder in the middle for your phone.  It centers your phone in a harsh and cold ring of LED light, and that's not even its worst problem.  The worst of it is that it makes the creepiest little white circle at the center of your eyeballs which produces some weird kind of zombifying effect.  At best.  At worst it looks makes you look like a cyborg.

I am either being recorded or those things are about to shoot bright blue lasers.

So please, people, lay off the ring lights.  The ring light was originally the domain of dentists.  It's a great light source for super closeup (macro) photography because when you get the camera really close to the subject the lens blocks your light, so having a ring of light on the end of the lens was kind of the perfect solution.  These lights used to be called dental rings.  Now I think they are just called "lights".  It would be best if we just called them off.

Right!

Back in the 1900's when I went to a college with training wheels on it, I was taking my final exam in a computer class.  The class was about databases.  It's where I learned the word "concatenate", which is a tremendously fun word.  Let's all say it!  conCATenate   FUN!

I understood that class.  It wasn't that hard but navigating your way around a database requires its own sort of choreography that can trip you up so it was really just about learning some of that.

At this final exam, the instructor asked us to pull a list of names from Group A and Group B that met a similar criteria.  It was one of a series of queries (and I think I am going to trademark "Series of Queries" and somehow use it to profit from the gay community) we had to do for this final exam.  These queries were set up at a variety of workstations around the classroom and we could do them in any order we wanted.  I noticed everyone in the class breezed through this particular question.  When I got to it I hit a brick wall.  With a couple more queries to go, I spent a good chunk of my time trying to figure out how to do this one.

Here's where I make the long story shorter.  Turns out the question was not valid.  Data from Group A and Group B just does not intersect.  After about 15 valuable minutes of self-doubt, wondering if I was sick on the ONE day we discussed how to do this, I boldly (but quietly) went to the instructor and said "This can't be done" fully expecting a disappointed look and perhaps a "I can't help you" but the instructor stared at the question in silence for a good ten count and just said "Leave it blank."

Okay.  So everyone else in the class answered it wrong.  I got it right.  What, do you suppose, are the chances everyone else will have their scores reduced?  Hold on - let me run a quick query on that.  Oh - ZERO.  ZERO CHANCE.

Here's my point, summarized as quickly as possible in the least preachy way I can muster because it's a new year and who wants to start out with a lecture?

Being the only one who is right isn't an automatic free pass.  It puts you against the grain and that makes you a little wrong.  So if you plan to actually do anything with the info, it can take a little courage to be the only one who is right.  Look at the guy who knew the Space Shuttle wasn't ready for launch.  He was the only one and he wasn't insistent enough to stop "the machine" behind the machine so off it went.

Call it groupthink, herd mentality, conformity... whatever buzzword you like. When everyone else has it wrong and you have it right, you're in a position, and I think you often have to weigh the advantages of calling out the error because the first reaction will be that you are difficult.  You're also going to embarrass a bunch of people.  You're going to screw up the social dynamic.  It better be worth it.  Maybe it is, but you might be wrong.