Day 10 in Cambridge

We had breakfast at this new guest house. The serving was just nice for me but the scrambled eggs tasted much better back in AllenBell. The mushrooms were nice but smaller compared to there too. Overall, breakfast was still great!

As this guest house was pretty far from our factory, we called for a taxi & decided to share the fare 3 ways. But in fact it is only 2 ways, because I'll be paying for that chinaman. Yeah, he is indeed turning out to be a huge burden for me.

Anyway, it took only abt 10mins for the driver to take us to our destination & it was only 830am. David will definitely be late as he will be driving over from London. The traffic there was supposedly a killer.

I was having a smoke near the car park when I saw him driving in at abt 845am. He joined me for a stick too & I found out he wasn't caught in London traffic. In fact, it took him 45 mins just to get to the factory from the city center. But it will only be for the weekend as he's staying in a suite near the factory that's paid for by our company.

We carried on our training after that & today we were taught how to change filaments. I've had handful of experience on this so as usual, I let the rest of them to do it. I kept a watchful eye over them & discovered some rather interesting traits of their character. Firstly, Alex has a real good theory knowledge of how our equipment works & always like to be the first to try something new, but he will get his directions right before plunging into it. Next, David is very careful in what he's doing & although he is the biggest size amongst us, he does produce some real delicate work. Lastly, the chinaman is like a blind bull. Always trying to be the first to interfere, headbutting into other's work like a backseat driver & almost nothing but a plain destroyer. I mean, you've got to know the fundamentals of microscopy before you start instructing others. David was previously a service engineer with Hitachi & I seriously don't think he needs a blind bull to tell him what to do. Do you teach your dad how to fuck? It's pretty much the same thing. I really had to control myself from smacking him. It was just that tough holding myself back. Really.

Anyway, the day ended without much hiccups. We changed the filament back to a Lab6 from a Tungsten tip & managed to pump the system down to kickstart the ion getter pump. The ion getter pump needs to be pumping in order to run a Lab6 filament as it requires to be in high vacuum to function. To attain a high vacuum in the column, a bake-out is absolutely necessary so we performed that function when the vacuum hits the threshold & we called it a day. It was already 430pm by then & David was too kind to give us a lift back as his suite was in the other direction from the factory.

Although the chinaman was a real pain to work with, I seriously hope he'd picked up enough to manage the systems in China. I would dread travelling there just to support him. In fact, I hope I never see him again!

Hmm... I just realise up till today, he's only been known as "the chinaman". Well, his name is Jiang Wei Yao but all our fellow trainers & trainees call him Jiang. Caucasians tend to have this problem with chinese names. Me? I just like to call him the chinaman...