Timmons Reflective Essay One
The first fifty hours of my internship this semester have been extremely exciting. The entire assembly team is getting a new warehouse, which has triple the assembly space, six racks for imaging servers, and its own separate area for packaging servers. Up until now, we’ve done most of our work in another area of the building, with only one table for assembly, and four racks for imaging.

I’ve focused the majority of my time during the first fifty hours of the internship trying to master assembly. In doing so, I’ve come across a couple of mistakes one could make. One of the deadliest assembly errors I’ve come across so far is the bending of the CPU in its motherboard socket. Meaning, the CPU is not placed flush into the motherboard socket, resulting in it bending/bowing as you try to put the metal retainer piece on top of it to keep it in place. This in turn breaks the processor, making it unusable. The reason this accident is so problematic (assuming you don’t catch it while assembling) is as follows; unpacking of all materials takes around 10 minutes, prep-work for the chassis and motherboard takes another 10 minutes, assembly can be from around 15-20 minutes. The server isn’t immediately imaged, so you won’t catch the problem until you complete the order, place it on the rack, and plug it in. Then, you troubleshoot the server, not knowing it’s the CPU, checking that last. To check if the CPU is the issue involves almost complete disassembly of the server to get to the CPU itself. On top of this, you have to take the entire motherboard out of the chassis to see if the pins on the board itself are bent. As you can see, this error is extremely time consuming. Novice assemblers must be proactively looking at how they place the CPU, as once you put the metal retainer clip/fan on, you can’t tell if its bent. In assembly, I’ve learned slow is fast. Mark, my manager, has never said go faster, and has always encouraged slowing down or going slow to ensure no mistakes.

Other than the CPU, bending the Sata cables while they are in a hard drive can also become problematic. I was working with a 16-terabyte hard drive, zip typing together the cables, and the Sata cable snapped out of the hard drive itself, taking the entire connector with it. Very infuriating. It is worth mentioning, however, computer components can be surprisingly resilient, as long as you don’t go out of your way to intentionally break/apply to much force to them. Below I’ve provided some miscellaneous photos below of some of the work I’ve done the past few weeks.

I left this one intentionally large for a reason, so you can see what I’m talking about regarding the CPU.  Here is an example of a bent CPU. You can see that it is barely not flush with the socket, and, when seen from the side, has a noticeable bend….