Keje keje

Going to work

Wake up everydat at 630am, join the crazy morning rush hour for an hour driving through 3 highways, 2 tollbooths and listening to Mix fm.

First week of work

Okay.Visted two factories.

First factory

Hong Leong Yamaha

It was impressive.It was the first time I visited a semi automated motorcycle plant with robotic welding arms!!!.Although my first factory was the Holden plant in Adelaide,the Yamaha plant was just as impressive. The plant uses a smoke extraction system from Blondal which removes welding smog from the production line. Yamaha apparently was very picky about cost and chose a pollutant control system which is rather unsuitable in my opinion. That's how manufcaturers work, they only spend to comply to minimum requirement, never mind the workers will probably have cancer at the end of their life.

One thing I learn is that it is no use having fancy english. My supervisor and the Chinese Yamaha engineers spoke in pidgin type of English which is incomprehensible!!!! Seriously!! I can't imagine how I will speak If I am stucke here for seberal years. ALready my vocabulary capacity is dwindling!!...Need a new novel to pump up my Engrisshhhh...

We were just there to inspect some contractor's job who did the installation of Blondal's air pollutant system. It seems the factory was refurbished, hence the fabrication equipements were dismantled and reassembled. For 8 months some of the equipments were left oudoors and after reassembly, they are facing problems for some of the fabrication line and naturally, since they can't blame each other they decided to attack the conractors. Blondal's Sales Engineer, Peter inspected the affected equipments and will call another fabricator for a second opinion.It was a good insight on what a sales engineer does, solving customer's stupid problems.

Q.Cell Plant

The best moment of the week. A german solar cell plant whose construction was rejected in China and Indonesia due to environmental issued...guess Malaysia is willing to take all the shit for $.

Being a typical manufacturere, 99% of their workers is Indonesian....so in a way..we should congratulate Indonesia for having a solar cell plant? As usual, after building the plant as cheaply as possible and masquerading it as a colorful building, they are having dust problems and wanted a centralized vacuum system. Blondal was called to survey the manufacturing site.

We actually entered the manufacturing area and it was soooo COOOOLL..closest thing to a Star Trek environment. We had to cover our shoes in plastic and wear lab coats. The site consist of a large white area iwth yellow floors crammed with automated machineries, processing silicon wafers to be used in solar panels. Most of the processesare handled by robotic arms and a conveyor belt system which was really efficient.Everything works like flowing water..an engineering accomplishment!!! The human operators only monitor the machineries and pack the finished silicon wafers. The blue wafers are very thin and and some them break, strewning the floor with bits of blue dust and pieces.Q-Cell did not like this and asked as to design a central vacuum system to mop them up.Simply, they want a large central vacuum with extended tubes stretching along the site with vacuuming outlets. This makes things simpler as they do not have to carry around mobile and bulky vacuums, instead, they only plug in extractors to the vacuum outlets around the site. The problem is, there are not many space to place the vacuum tubes on the ceiling which is already full of other interconnecting wires and pipes. If they planned ahead, they could have built the vacuum tubes inside the floor which is what a smilar plant in Singapore does(according to Peter), but it is too late for them. A centralized system is possible but Peter was not willing to do the installlation and advised Q-Cell to find another installer.Apparenly Q-Cell agree and Blondal will provide a preliminary design. If Q-Cell accepts them, Blondal gets paid, I get 10% of it. Hence,this is my first project.

The problem is, Blondal lost a CD with all their drawing templates.Hence, I can't proceed with the engineering drawing and stuck with my preliminary hand drawn sketches with complete dimensions which I finished calculating.Hence I decided to write this blog out of boredom. Oh.the aircond here is so fucking cold..demit...

Is it ok?

It is OK..lahhh.But I still think it is an Ah Beng company.Not very organized.To tell the truth, Chinese Social Capital helps this kind of companies.The contractirs Chinese, fabrcators chinese..you get my idea.. I am am the only Malay male in their engineering department if you exclude the underpaid Malay techncians.I am not sure why they hire me.Maybe think I am a liberal Malay but Peter is a good man and he eats rice with hands..first time I saw a Malaysian Chinese do that..not to mention calling other Chinese 'Chinaman' which he refers to as greedy stingy Chinese companies who build factories as cheap a possible to reap max. profit..and these are the customers that Blondal is servicing!!! I guess there are good Chinese who see beyond racial superiority and chauvinism.. I appreciated the site visits but I am still unclear about what to do.I can't do my work because they coud not provide the templates and Nadia, my supervsior, is not very helpful when I asked for help. The first week has not given me a good impression of the team although I enjoyed the visits to the factories!!!Maybe it is just me with a very high expectation..

However,if MAS offers me the trainee position.I will take up the offer.Insya-Allah....it seems I have given up on MEMC....