THE RESISTOR OF DIVERSITY
A True-ish Tale from the Semiconductor Front Lines
When management at the WaffleTech Semiconductor Plant announced they were launching a Diversity & Inclusion Initiative, most employees figured it would involve a potluck lunch, a suspiciously vague PowerPoint, and maybe someone putting googly eyes on the HR printer.
They were wrong.
What began as a good-faith effort to broaden hiring criteria turned into one of the most unpredictable, electrically unstable, and oddly enlightening experiences in silicon fabrication history.
⚙️ DAY 1: “NO MORE GATEKEEPING”
It started simply: HR removed the line in job postings requiring “experience with reality” and opened applications to any sentient being capable of differentiating between a capacitor and a cashew.
Within days, the WaffleTech parking lot was full of unusual applicants:
- A mime named Doug who communicated entirely in surface-mount gestures.
- A 4’11” woman named Laser Rita who claimed she could etch wafers using only her eyes.
- A barn owl wearing a “Clean Room or Die” T-shirt.
- Three philosophy majors (they didn’t apply—they just wandered in looking for air conditioning and meaning).
The hiring team, in the spirit of true inclusion, brought them all on.
🔧 DAY 14: “THE LANGUAGE OF RESISTANCE”
Problems arose when they discovered that the barn owl, although punctual and excellent at spotting defective photomasks, kept pooping on the clean room boots. HR issued it a warning and a beak-sized respirator.
Meanwhile, Laser Rita accidentally activated the sprinkler system twice during a shift by blinking with excessive enthusiasm.
Doug the Mime? A genius. He redesigned the wafer transport system using only hand motions and a broken Roomba. He was later promoted to Lead Silent Process Engineer.
The philosophy majors sat in the break room arguing over whether a gate oxide could ever truly be thin, and whether P-N junctions represented the duality of man.
🔋 DAY 25: “WE’RE NOT SURE WHAT HAPPENED, BUT SOMETHING’S OSCILLATING”
Under new guidelines, all hiring managers had to fill at least one position per week with “an underrepresented perspective.” This led to:
- A Buddhist capacitor that refused to hold charge, citing “attachment issues.”
- A left-handed CMOS chip that only processed in reverse.
- A highly progressive flip-flop that refused to maintain any binary state longer than 500 milliseconds unless it had been consulted in advance.
One wafer inspector turned out to be a sleepwalking accordionist who thought lithography was a type of Hungarian jazz. He accidentally discovered a new etching technique by sneezing on a batch of silicon and blaming it on “corporate vibes.”
🌈 DAY 37: “EMBRACE YOUR INNER IMPEDANCE”
The Diversity Task Force (which now included a basset hound and someone from shipping who only spoke in ham radio abbreviations) instituted a company-wide exercise called Bias Bypass Friday. Everyone had to wear someone else’s ESD smock, carry a resistor that didn’t match their values, and empathize with a diode.
One bipolar junction transistor cried during a small-group sharing session.
Another employee claimed he could hear the microchips “screaming in Morse code.” IT checked his workstation—he’d plugged his headphones into the 12V line again.
⚡ DAY 42: “WE HAVE ACHIEVED TOTAL INCLUSION… AND A MAJOR SHORT CIRCUIT”
It all culminated during the company-wide “Open Voltage Day,” when everyone could operate any machine they felt called to, regardless of training, experience, or basic understanding of electricity.
A philosophy major programmed the sputtering chamber to quote Plato’s Republic.
The owl was promoted to VP of Optical Inspection.
Laser Rita initiated something called “Photon Ballet,” which looked artistic but resulted in a Class 3 capacitor fire.
Doug the Mime gave a closing keynote speech titled “Silence as Throughput.” No one heard it, but the applause was thunderous.
🎖 THE OUTCOME
Despite the chaos (or perhaps because of it), WaffleTech posted record productivity. Employee morale soared. The break room refrigerator was finally cleaned (by accident, during an HR-sponsored goat yoga event).
Best of all, the company’s new chip design—based on intuition, radical inclusion, and a partially eaten schematic—accidentally solved a major bottleneck in quantum computing.
They now sell it under the name:
“Unintentional Intelligence™”
It works on some days, responds to emotionally charged questions, and is currently being used to model cloud behavior in unstable atmospheres—or possibly just analyze goat yoga attendance trends.
In the end, the CEO concluded:
“Diversity may not build perfect chips…
But it does build one hell of a story.”
And that, dear reader, is why every WaffleTech circuit board now includes the secret engraving:
“All frequencies welcome.”
