7.15.2004

 

[bunny hop]

found myself in Singapore Poly's clean room (incidentally, in the same building where i took the Communications System Engineering course in my cadet days.. yes, *that* building, teck & PP! apparently its the sch of engineering building or something) earlier this week, and the sight of all the bunny suits (not to mention the act of wearing them) left me trying very hard to stifle my laughter. it's just... weird. to put things in perspective, the moment you enter the room, you hit an office, and you must change your shoes to 'lab slippers'. then you go through two sets of sticky anti-dust mats, the kind that your 'lab slippers' stick to like there's no tomorrow, before entering the changing room. there you need to put on a jumpsuit (white for the poly students, blue for staff/faculty, green for other 'registered' users, hence i found myself wearing green) before swapping your slippers for jumpsuit-matching plastic pieces that go over your bare feet/socks. then gloves, a face mask, a hair mask, before you roll the hood of the jumpsuit over. after that, a quick blast of air through a set of double doors before you enter the actual clean room.

inside the clean room are all sorts of machines and things they use to fabricate chips and stuff. each piece of equipment looks like it cost a million.. and it's about as hard to use as it is expensive.

what really struck me was the difference in viewpoint between engineers and biologists: to engineers / microchip manufacturers, humans are contaminants that the clean microchips have to be protected from, hence the bunny suits; to biologists / virologists, viruses are contaminants that the clean humans have to be protected from, hence the bunny suits. on one hand people are 'dirty', whereas on the other, people are 'clean'.. it's all mind-boggling. to me, at least.

timestamp: anonymous 13:39 0 comments