The first job came across on the fax, many pages long. The first pages were the job description and an explanation from some in-use-in-1996 library on diskette about exactly what silicon wafer manufacturing was. Included was a casual mention that the engineers I was tasked with seeking might be found to be visiting within “clean rooms”, from time to time, whatever those were. At least, at the companies that still had manufacturing facilities within the U.S.
A clean room is an enclosed clean space in which semiconductor manufacturing takes place. Airborne particles are reduced to technically feasible minimum; temperature and humidity of ambient air are also strictly controlled.
Other words bandied loosely about included wafer fabrication, automation, hydrocarbon, beam lines, vacuum systems, space applications, cubic volumes of air.
Finally, a list of companies came across. They included names, as best as I can recall, like:
AMD
Analog Devices
Cypress Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor
Fujitsu
Hitachi
Intel
Micrel Semiconductor
National Semiconductor
NEC
ON Semiconductor
Panasonic
Philips Semiconductors
STMicroelectronics
Sony Semiconductor
Texas Instruments
Toshiba
and many others that have since morphed into other entities today.
Bewildered but not yet having the sense to be bothered, I read through the list recognizing a few household names but noting the others. Each company had been “set up” for me; that is, the Hoovers information had been placed beneath each company name, giving me the phone number and a short explanation about what the company did. It was all Greek to me at this point. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what most of the stuff meant!
Last, but not least, out of the mouth of the machine began to spew a list of names that appeared interesting. Tongue twisting, but interesting nonetheless.
Xing Xang Liu, 94 Process Engineer/lithography NEC direct dial
Jing Ling Xiu, 96 Applications Engineer STMicroelectronics direct dial
Lin Xiu Ling, 95 Sr. Design Engineer Fujitsu main number, extension number
Kevin Yang, 91 Semiconductor Device Engineer Sony Semiconductor
Jen-Hsu Huang, 89 Mechanical Design Engineer Micrel Semiconductor direct dial
Sanjay Jain, 93 Sr. Process Engineer Panasonic
Mike Watkins, 95 CAD Engineer Texas Instruments
And on and on and on, hundreds of them, until my eyes crossed to meet the shape of my tongue.
The phone rang. It was a long distance call from Northern California from the company who was requesting I do this work for them as an Independent Contractor.
“These names, what are they?” I asked my contact.
“Those are names from your target companies that we’ve identified in the past on other jobs. Some of them are in the right space, as you can see some of their titles match exactly what it is you’re looking for. Others may know people within their organization who hold the titles you need to identify. You’ll get credit for any that are still there, as long as their titles are still in the correct space.”
“What do you mean?” I asked again. “You’ll pay me to verify names you’ve already identified?” I asked. I tried to hold the incredulity down in my voice. Even then I recognized the power of tone.
“Yes, we’ll pay you to verify but the real purpose of these names is to help you get into the right groups.”
Not quite understanding that but gleefully echoing in my mind that all I had to do was call and verify that the names were “still there” I quickly hung up the phone. Grabbing a big fat yellow marker I drew lines through the names that matched exactly the title I was after. It took about five minutes to scour all the names. Then I eagerly picked up the phone. I dialed the ones first that had direct dials, thinking it would be easiest. Ring-a-ding-ding. Ring-a-ding-ding. Ring-a-ding-ding.
“The number you have called has been disconnected. Call our main number to be redirected.”
“Ugh.” Chalking it up to bad luck I dialed another. Same ring drill. A female voice came on the phone and I quickly realized it was a VoiceMail. NOT the male what-appeared-to-be-asian voice I was expecting. It invited me to leave my name and number to receive a call back. I hung up.
“Okay, let’s try another,” I still cheerfully suggested to myself. After one ring a heavily accented male voice answered. “Ha-wo,” he called. Surprised, I blurted his name out. “Peter?” (After this person’s given foreign-looking name was the name “Peter” in quotation marks.) “Yes?” he answered.
NOW WHAT? “What do I say?” flashed through my mind. I’d forgotten to ask about that part!
“Peter, are you the Senior Process Engineer there?” I asked, reading his title off the page. I could feel panic rising.
“Yes,” he answered. “One of many,” he half laughed.
Buoyed and encouraged, I soldiered on. “Can you tell me who the others are?”
“Are you a headhunter?” he shot back, his demeanor suddenly sounding grim.
Familiar with the terminology but not thinking that that was what I was at that point, I answered “No”.
“You sure?” he cross-examined. “We get wots of headhunters calwing here. I’m the Pwacess Engineering Manager. How can I help you?”
“Uhhh…ummmm,” I stammered. I knew I was lost. I had NO IDEA what to say. I realized I’d jumped into this way too fast and, knowing better, immediately regretted that I had not done some study on the front-end. It just looked so easy, like it would be shooting fish in a barrel. Uh-huh, yeah, sure.
“Can you tell me who all the Process Engineers are there?” I continued, feeling myself sink as I spoke the words.
"No, you can call Human Wesources for that infamation," with the rat-a-tat cadence of the asian language. Then he hung up.
He hung up on me! Relieved, I sat back and reassessed. I dialed the 408 area code number to the mother ship. Michael, my “Project Manager” answered. (“What the heck was a Project Manager?” I wondered to myself at the time. I was soon to find out.)
“Michael! These numbers aren’t working. The first couple I called were either disconnected or wrong and the third one was the right guy but his title is wrong – he’s a Manager - not a Sr. Process Engineer!” I wailed indignantly in one hot, tumbling outraged rush.
“What kind of manager?” he patiently asked.
“What do you mean what kind of manager?” I snapped, thinking he was trying to patronize me and avoid the fact that the numbers he gave me were “wrong”. “The nerve,” I thought to myself.
“How did you find out he was a manager?’ he patiently asked again, still sounding maddeningly calm.
“I asked, Michael, if he was the Sr. Process Engineer and he said he was the Process Engineering Manager,” I snarled, frustrated. “What was he missing?” I thought to myself in my excited state. I could feel myself ratcheting.
“That’s good,” Michael answered. “But it won’t work for what we’re looking for. It’s a start, though, Maureen; you want to get to the Process Engineers under him. Apparently, the last time we spoke with him he was not yet a manager. Since then he has become one. See the date at the end of the names on the list? That was the last time we spoke with these people. What is the number at the end of his name?” he asked.
“92,” I answered.
“That means the last time we spoke with him was 1992 and he had the title that was listed. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that in four years his title could have changed from Sr. Process Engineer to Manager?” He was so gentle, so patient, so kind!
“Yeah, I suppose so,” I groused.
“The good news is he’s still there, is still in Process Engineering and probably has a bunch of engineers under him. His company will have hundreds of Process Engineers, Maureen, not just one...” he kindly instructed and then he proceeded to give me one of the many hundreds of “short lessons” I would require through the coming year. He made me aware that a simple misplaced word like “the” instead of “one of” in the sentence query, “…are you the Senior Process Engineer there?” would give me away. “Are you one of the Senior Process Engineers there?” would have made so much more sense to Peter’s ear and may have prompted him to be just a tad more cooperative.
I listened disconsolately as Michael outlined the fact that the names on the list he’d sent over are likely to be either in different positions at present (unless they were critically recent, like that year ‘96) and that they were to be used cautiously, gingerly, purposefully, in order to get “other” names. They were a mere trickle into the much larger stream that I needed to get into. He demonstrated how “dialing around” some of the direct dials listed on the sheet into a specific company are more than likely to be a direct conduit onto the desk of employees within. This startled me and intrigued me. At the end of it all, my head was spinning. Oh, I had so much to learn!
******
This information is not to be re-published for commercial purposes in any form without the prior written permission of Maureen Sharib.
Do something today you don’t think you can do. Lose phone fear here.
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How did your parents talk about money and finances with you when you were a child? And how is that different or similar to how you talk about money with your kids today? Finally, what single piece of financial advice would you like to share with today's kids? I am not claiming to have the road map for every parent. We all have different values, different incomes and strong ideas about how best to raise children -- and you will likely scoff at some of the things I've done. With that caveat, here are a dozen ways I have endeavored to help my kids financially.~ Mr. Clements, who is based in New York, writes the Getting Going column for The Wall Street Journal. 
