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Petty Power Plant Jokes Played on Prominent Power Plant Men
Originally posted September 13, 2013:
Of the 1,500 jokes played on Power Plant Men while I was working at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, I can only remember a handful of the smaller ones. There are some I'm saving for later topics. Sometimes it was the smallest jokes that spoke the loudest. Especially when great care was taken to play the joke just right.
I think it was the idea that someone thought enough of you to spend a great deal of time setting up a joke just for the one little moment that the person finally realizes that they have been played. It's when that smile comes across their face that all that work pays off. The realization that someone else would spend so much time just to make you smile was a good indication that they really did care about you.
In the post called, "Why Stanley Elmore and Other Power Plant Questions" I told a story about when I was a janitor in the electric shop and one of the electricians Andy Tubbs had been playing jokes on me while I was cleaning the bathroom. The funniest one was when I had turned around for a moment and when I went to go grab the dust mop, the handle to the mop was missing, while the dust mop was just sitting there on the floor. The handle was propped against the wall across the shop while Andy was innocently looking at a blueprint.
Charles Foster, my electric foremen had told me of a time when he played a joke on a welder in the welding shop that was welding away on something. The power to the welding machine was around the corner. Charles picked up the cord for the welder and kinked it like you would kink a water hose to stop the water from flowing. When he kinked it, the welding machine stopped working.
The welder looked at the machine to find that the power was off. Then he looked over and saw that Charles was standing about 40 feet away grinning at him holding the kinked cable. About that time, Charles straightened out the cable and the welding machine turned back on. The welder spun around to find the welding machine humming away. He looked back at Charles who kinked the cable again and the welding machine again shut off.
Amazed, the welder said something like, "I didn't know you could do that!" Charles shrugged, dropped the cable and walked off. Unbeknownst to the welder, as Charles left, he met up with the other electrician that had been opening an closing the electric disconnect where the welding machine received its power. Leaving the welder unaware.
In the electric shop there is one bathroom. It is shared by all electricians, and therefore it has a lock on the door because Diana Lucas (Brien) had to use it. But sometimes someone might not realize that it was used jointly by both male and female members of the Power Plant family, and they might not lock the door. So, on occasion, Dee would go into the bathroom only to find that it was already occupied.
Once she entered the bathroom and found that someone was in the stall. She waited around for a while and asked me to go check it out because the guy was taking quite a long time and what at first was only a minor inconvenience was becoming higher priority. So, I entered there bathroom and sure enough. The stall was closed and there was a pair of boots easily visible under the stall where someone sat taking their own sweet time.
Dee finally figured that it wasn't worth the wait and walked across the T-G floor to the maintenance shop to the nearest women's restroom. After a while someone else remarked that someone was in the bathroom and had been in there a long time. At that point, it became obvious that either someone had died while sitting on his thinkin' chair, or something else was definitely amiss.
So, one of the electricians decided to see if everything was all right. That was when they peered into the stall to find that there was only a pair of boots sitting all by themselves in the stall. It turned out that O D McGaha had put them there. He locked the stall, then climbed out under the stall and left them there. — It was a pretty good joke. It had half the shop concerned about the mysterious stranger in the stall.
Soon after this episode, a new sign was placed on the bathroom door:
Other little jokes like that were played on individuals throughout the 20 years that I worked at the plant. One small one that is a typical example of many was when Mickey Postman drove to work one morning with a brand new motorcycle. He was really proud of the new machine. Well. Mickey's nickname at the time was "Pup".
Mickey had two main reasons why he was a prime target for having jokes played on him. First, he took the jokes pretty well, because he would have a definite reaction. Sometimes good. Sometimes not so. The second reason was that he was red-headed. That meant that when he realized that a joke was being played on him, his face would turn as red as his hair. Everyone witnessing this couldn't help but smile.
Mickey had worked his way into the maintenance shop from a janitor as I had, though he missed the labor crew (I believe) because it hadn't been dreamed up by Ray Butler yet. He and I were practically the same age. He is 7 months older than I am. So, I always felt like, "but for the grace of God go I". No. I don't really mean it. I care a lot for Mickey and I never personally considered him as a candidate for jokes. I guess it was because he already had a cohort of Power Plant Men willing to play that part.
So, anyway. Mickey had this shiny new motorcycle parked out in the parking lot all day, so it was inevitable that at least one of the many Power Plant Men that had been assigned to the "Play a Joke on Mickey" detail, would happen to pass by the motorcycle in the parking lot. One of them would have felt obligated to reach down and turn the gas valve off.
The word had gone out throughout the plant that the valve had been closed on Mickey's motorcycle so that we were all to expect that about the time that Mickey hit the bridge over the discharge on the way out the gate, his motorcycle would run out of fuel and die. It's times like this that you never forget. A simple joke. A couple hundred Power Plant men all chuckling as they drove across the discharge bridge grinning at Mickey trying to restart his brand new motorcycle that had died perfectly positioned midway across the bridge. His face beaming as red as his hair!
I won't go into the Wedding present that was given to Mickey Postman the day before his wedding. I intended this post to be only about petty or "minor" jokes. That one was a doozy. Actually. I will never post anything about it, other than to say that I wouldn't ever say anything about how the machinist's blue dye was applied.
Machinist's Blue Dye, or Layout fluid is used when honing down a surface to make sure it is flat. There are other uses for it, but that is the one I am most familiar with. I wonder how that blue color looked along with Mickey's red face…
Here are examples of two small jokes that took a lot of preparation.
The first one involved Howard Chumbley's chair. Howard was a foreman in the electric shop. One of the nicest Power Plant Men in all of God's creation. He was shorter than most taller people. And he was particular about how high his chair was adjusted. Being particular about anything automatically meant that you were a prime target for a joke dealing with whatever you were particular about.
Back then (1984), the height of an office chair was adjusted by turning it upside down and spinning the wheel bracket around to screw in or out the shaft.
So, Charles and I would rotate the bottom of the wheels around 1/4 turn each day. That meant just moving the wheels around to one set of wheels. Not very much. Every week the bracket would only be turned about 1 time, especially given that we wouldn't remember to do it every day.
Eventually, after 5 or 6 weeks, Howard would go to sit down in his chair and realize that it was lower than he would like it to be. So, he would turn it over and lay the seat on his desk and spin the wheel bracket around a few times. Then test it and do it again until it was just the right height. Howard probably never thought about why every month and a half or so, his chair would be too short and he would end up turning it over and adjusting it back up.
This was a joke that Howard never knew was being played, but every time that chair went upside down, you can bet that Charles and I were grinning from ear-to-ear to have been there to watch it.
Ok. the last story has to be about Gene Day. After all. There was no one that I loved playing jokes on more than Gene Day. Actually, half of them, Gene probably never knew had been jokes. I have written two posts about playing jokes on Gene Day. One of them was just about one joke. See "Psychological Profile of a Control Room Operator" and "Power Plant Humor and Joking with Gene Day".
So, this particular week, I noticed that Gene Day was the auxiliary operator for Unit 1 Boiler. That meant that at least once each shift he was going to walk through the Unit 1 Precipitator Control Room that housed the controls for the 84 transformers on the precipitator roof.
So, I decided, this was a perfect opportunity to play a petty joke on Gene Day. I took an Eeprom chip that was used to hold the control program for a Precipitator control cabinet, and proceeded to rewrite the program.
I found the code in the assembly language code that sent the message to the display when there was an overcurrent trip. That is, when the cabinet trips, the little LCD display would say: "Overcurrent Trip". I rewrote the code to say: "Gene Day Trip". This meant finding the code string: 4F:76:65:72:63:75:72:72:65:6E:74:20:54:72:69:70 and replacing it with: 47:65:6E:65:20:44:61:79:20:54:72:69:70:20:20:20. I wrote the program for a specific cabinet in the middle of the precipitator that I could trip without causing an issue in the general operation of the precipitator.
Then I took the chip to the Precipitator Control room and replaced the control chip for that cabinet and left it running. I had seen Gene Day on his way to the Precipitator Control room the day before, so I had a pretty good idea what time he would be passing through. Because no matter how lazy Gene Day was, he was always consistent. (Gene you know I'm kidding…. right?)
Anyway. I spied Gene leaving the control room around the time I expected, so I made haste to the Precip. Control Room and with my screwdriver, after opening the cabinet, I reached down to the tripping mechanism for an overcurrent trip and I tripped the cabinet. Then leaving from the opposite direction that Gene would be arriving, I slipped out of the Precip Control Room and headed for the plant control room to see Gene's reaction when he arrived.
About the time I was going around the corner in the breezeway toward the Unit 1 elevator, I saw that Gene had already exited the precip. area, so when I entered the T-G basement I quickly called Gene on the gray phone. Gene turned around and went back in the Precip switchgear (which was just below the control cabinets).
When Gene answered the phone I told him that I was looking at the Precipitator controls in the control room and I saw that one of the cabinets had tripped and I was wondering if he had just been out there because the error indicated something very strange. He said he had just been in there and hadn't noticed that a cabinet had tripped.
So, I asked him if he could look again, it was 1D8. I needed to know what the cabinet display said had happened because it looked like Gene had done something to it. He told me he hadn't touched anything, but he would go look. — of course, when went to look at it, the display showed: "Gene Day Trip".
So, I was sitting at the precipitator computer for Unit 1 when Gene Day arrived in the Control room. As was typical with Gene Day, my head began to waiver and my eyes began to blur as Gene had grabbed me by the throat and was shaking me back and forth. My eyes may have been blurry, and I know that I was acting totally surprised as if I didn't know what had happened, but you can believe that inside I was grinning ear-to-ear!
Comment from original post:
September 21, 2013:
Folks will go to elaborate lengths and great effort to perform jokes like these on fellow workers while feeling put-upon and resentful at something half the trouble requested done by the boss… We are a funny species!
More comments from the last repost:
I love these stories!
OK Kevin – how could you remember those lines of Eeprom code from 30 years ago?
Also, I know somebody is playing a joke on me (like what you did to Howard Chumbley). My bathroom scales are going up about 1 pound every week. Can't figure out who's responsible yet 😦
Power Plant Women and the EEOC Shuffle
Originally posted November 30, 2013:
While I worked as a janitor at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma the subject came up one Monday morning about the normal career path that janitors could take. We had already been told that the only place a janitor could advance to was the labor crew. We had also been told that there was a company policy that came down from Oklahoma City that only allowed janitors to move to the labor crew before they could move on to another job like an Operator or Mechanic.
I had been trying to decide if I wanted to go the route of being an Operator or a Mechanic during my time as a janitor. That is, until Charles Foster asked me if I would be interested in becoming an Electrician. I hadn't even considered being an electrician up to that point, as I had no experience and it seemed like a job that needed a particular skill set.
I had begun my studies to learn about being an electrician when there was an opening in the Electric Shop. Charles Foster and Bill Bennett petitioned to hire me for the position, but the verdict came down from above that according to Company Policy, a janitor could only advance from janitor to the labor crew.
I didn't have any expectation at the time of becoming an electrician given that I had no experience, so I wasn't disappointed when Mike Rose was hired from outside the company. He was hired to help out Jim Stevenson with Air Conditioning and Freeze Protection.
The next revelation about our position as janitor at the plant (and I'm sure that Ron Kilman, our next plant manager, who reads this blog can testify that it really was company policy…. after all…. that's what our plant manager told us. — Just kidding…. I know that it really wasn't), was that when it became our turn to move from being a janitor to moving to the labor crew, if we didn't move to the labor crew during the next two openings on the labor crew, then we would be let go. I mean… we would lose our job.
This revelation came about when Curtis Love was next in line to go to the labor crew and he was turned down. Larry Riley, the foreman of the labor crew had observed Curtis while we were being loaned to the labor crew during outages and he didn't want him on the crew for um…. various reasons. After Curtis had been turned down, he was later told that if he didn't move onto the labor crew when there was another opening, then the company had to fire him. It was company policy (so we were told…. from Corporate Headquarters).
I had been around the plant long enough to know at that point that when we were told that it was company policy that came down to us from Corporate Headquarters, that, unless it was in our binders called General Policies and Procedures, then it probably wasn't really company policy. It was more likely our evil plant manager's excuse for not taking the responsibility himself and just telling us that this was the way it was, because he just said so….
Anyway… This caused a dilemma from an unlikely source on our team of janitors. Doris Voss became worried that if she didn't move onto the labor crew, that she would lose her job. She was quite content at the time to have just stayed a janitor, but from this policy that had just come down from Corporate Headquarters, (i.e. The front corner office of our plant), she either had to go to the labor crew, or lose her job.
So, what Doris decided to do was to apply for the job of receptionist that had just been vacated by Grant Harned (see the post "Power Plant Carpooling Adventures with Grant Harned"). Doris applied for the job and her application was accepted. She moved on to work at the receptionist desk. I, on the other hand, was next in line behind Curtis Love. So, when he was turned down for the labor crew, I took his place.
As a side note, I talked Larry Riley into letting Curtis Love advance to the labor crew when there was another opening. I told him that I would let him work with me, and that I would take care of him. With that caveat, Larry agreed. You can read a couple of adventures I had with Curtis after he arrived on the labor crew by reading these posts: "Power Plant Safety as Interpreted by Curtis Love" and "Angel of Death Passes by the Precipitator Door". Later, however, when I had moved on to be an electrician, Curtis was let go after having a vehicle accident and not reporting it right away.
What does this have to do with the EEOC shuffle? Well… about the time I have moved on to the labor crew, a new company-wide policy had been put in place for the internal "Employee Job Announcement Program". Our power plant had some "irregularities" surrounding where our new employees were coming from. It seems that an inordinate amount of new employees were coming from Pawnee, and more particularly from a certain church. It was obvious to some that a more "uniform" method needed to be in place to keep local HR staff from hiring just their buddies.
Along with this, came a mandate that all external job announcements had to be sent to various different unemployment offices in a certain radius in order to guarantee that everyone that was interested had the opportunity to be informed about any new positions at the plant well in time to apply for it. That was, if the Internal job announcement program didn't find any viable candidates within the company that was willing to take the job.
EEOC, by the way, means, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Around the same time that our plant had hired a "snitch" to go around an entrap unsuspecting employees into illegal activities (see the post: "Power Plant Snitch"), the EEOC had given us notice that we were not hiring enough women and American Indians as well as African Americans at the plant. Not only did we lack number, we also needed to have them spread out into a number of different jobs in the plant.
At the time the operators were 100% male. No women. The maintenance shop had a couple of women. The rest of the women at the plant were either clerks, working for the warehouse, or in the HR department…. Which all incidentally reported up to Jack Ballard our HR Supervisor. Well. Except for Yvonne Taylor in the Chemistry lab, and maybe someone that was on the testing team and of course Summer Goebel who was a Plant Engineer.
It wasn't just women that were affected. We had to have an African American in Upper Management. Bill Bennett had become an A Foreman a few years earlier, and there was some discussion about whether they could promote him up one more level. He refused the offer. Later they decided that an A Foreman at our plant was high enough to be considered "upper management".
American Indians were also a group of employees that needed to fill a certain quota. The Power Plant was located in North Central Oklahoma with many Indian Reservations surrounding it. I think we were supposed to have more than 10% American Indians employed at the plant. So the front office asked everyone to check to see if they were Indian enough to be considered. I think if you were 1/16th American Indian, you counted in the quota.
Some people were a little disturbed to be asked to report their racial status in order to fill a quota. Jerry Mitchell told me that he was Indian, but that he never had told anyone and he didn't want to become a number, so he wasn't going to tell them. I think we met our quota even without Jerry Mitchell and some others that felt insulted.
At the time, we had over 350 employees at the plant. That meant that we needed 35 women. I think we were closer to 25 when the push to hire more women went into effect.
The problem area that needed the most work was with the operators. Their entire organization had no women and they were told that they needed them. The problem was both structural and operational (yeah…. Operations had an operational problem…. how about that?).
There were two problems with hiring women to be operators. The first one was structural. The operators main base was the Control Room. That's where their locker room was. That's where their kitchen was. More importantly that's where they could all stand around and watch Gene Day perform feats of magic by doing nothing more than standing there being…. well… being Gene Day!
There was only a Power Plant men's locker room. There were no facilities for women. The nearest women's rest / locker room was across the main plant in the office area, or downstairs in the Maintenance shop. This presented a logistical problem, especially on days when Gene Day made his special Chili or tortilla soup (Ok, I'm just picking on Gene Day…. We all know Gene never could cook. We loved him anyway).
Either way, there were times when taking a trek across the plant to make it to the nearest restroom was not acceptable. This was solved by building an additional rest / locker room in the control room for women operators. That problem was solved.
The operational problem inherent in operations was that they worked shift work. That is, each week, they shifted the hours they worked. Operators had to be working around the clock. So, one week, they would work from 7:00 am to 3:30 pm. Next week they may work from 3pm to 11:30pm, or from 11pm to 7:30am. The plant didn't have any female applicants for a job where you had to work around the clock.
The EEOC said that wasn't good enough. We needed to find women to work in operations. This was where Doris Voss became a person of interest.
Doris was asked if she would like to become an operator. Of course, she said no. She really still wanted to be a janitor, but was content being a receptionist. I'm not sure what she was told or was given, but she eventually agreed and moved over to become an operator. Another clerk, Helen Robinson was later coaxed into becoming an operator. Mary Lou Teeman was also hired into the Operations department. I don't remember if she was a clerk before that, or if she was a new hire. — I do remember that she was the sweetest lady in operations.
Here is a picture that includes Doris Voss:
And here is Helen Robinson:
How is it that Charles Peavler showed up in two pictures? — Oh. Taken at different times. Note that Charles Peavler with the gray shirt in the front row is kneeling on one knee, but Larry Tapp with the blue shirt next to him is standing….. Hey. Larry Tapp may be short, but he's one of the nicest guys in this picture. I have a story about those two guys on the right side of this picture. Merl Wright and Jack Maloy. I'll probably include that as a side story in a later post (See the post: "Power Plant Conspiracy Theory").
With the addition of the three new female operators, the EEOC shuffle was satisfied. We had added a few new female employees from the outside world and everyone was happy. Julienne Alley was added to the Welding shop during this time. The entire maintenance crew would agree that their new "Shop" mother was the best of them all (See the post: "Power Plant Mother's Day").
Comment from the Original Post:
I don't know what "policies" Martin Louthan agreed to with the two coal plant managers. I remember them talking about how hard it was keeping good workers in their Labor crews. We didn't have Labor crews at the gas plants so we weren't affected. When I moved to Sooner, I don't remember that "policy" (terminated after 2 turn-downs to Labor crew) being in place. Was it?
No. It was just a policy created specifically to target one person. It was never enforced.
From Pioneers to Power Plant Managers
Originally posted December 28, 2013:
Times were changing in 1987 when the electric company in Oklahoma decided that they needed to downsize the company in order to change with the new business environment. I always seemed to think that the executives down at corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City knew that the old pioneers in charge of the Power Plants would be very difficult customers when it came to the new business model.
Like I said…. Times were changing. The digital era was being introduced to the power industry. We had already upgraded the precipitator controls to make them computerized. Other areas of the plant were going to be next. Especially the employees. Of course, none of us knew that quite yet, except Bill Rivers, who was a natural visionary, and he was gone.
Side story time:
I had always been interested in computers and programming from the time I was a sophomore in High School when I had just turned 15 years old. My friend Jesse Cheng had introduced me to one of the first programmable calculators, the HP-25.
This was the most wonderful Christmas present I had ever received. I literally felt myself fainting when I opened the present and found that I had been given a pair of cowboy boots, only to find an HP-25 calculator inside when I opened it up. Ralphie had nothing on me that day.
It was much like the Christmas Story with Ralphie. I had tried every with way to convince my parents that using a slide rule in High School was passe (pronounced "pass A"). All the other students in my advanced chemistry class were using calculators, and I was still stuck with my dad's old circular slide rule. It was a pretty neat one, I'll grant you that, but it just… well….. I could work things out on paper faster than I could use the slide rule.
I introduced my friend Jesse Cheng in the post "Why Do Power Plant Men Always Lose the Things They Love Most". He had an HP-25 calculator and had loaned it to me to take a Chemistry test. He showed me how it used Reverse Polish Notation, which is different than a normal calculator, but more like a computer.
The calculator could be programmed with 49 steps. Because it had a stack built right into it, and the reason it used Reversed Polish Notation, we could create all sorts of games with just those 49 steps. The book that came with the calculator had a moon landing game. We made more sophisticated games, like one called Battleship.
Anyway. Because of this early exposure with actually programming something in a logical manner, I was eager to learn more about programming. During college, my calculator was often sitting on my desk in the dorm room running a long program to help me perfect a random number generator. Finally in my Junior year in college, my calculator was completely fried.
After I was married at the end of 1985, I began subscribing to a magazine called "Compute". It had actual programs in it in Basic. I would read the programs to learn how it worked, but at that point, I didn't own a computer, so all I could do was dream about writing programs.
It wasn't until Thanksgiving 1987 when I went to visit my ol' friend Jesse Cheng in Columbia, Missouri who was interning as a medical doctor that I felt a sudden need to have a computer of my own. He had built a computer using a Heath Kit and we used it to play two computer games. One was called Starflight:
The other was called F15 Strike Eagle:
When I returned home I was pretty eager to buy a computer. Up until that time, every time my wife and I had gone to the mall, I always had stopped in the computer stores to look at the latest computers. I never had really considered buying one. But now, they had 20 megabyte hard drives! And you could play these terrific games like Starflight and F-15 Strike Eagle.
So, one day after we had left the mall, and my wife could see the look on my face, she finally said…. "Why don't you go and buy one?" I asked her, "Are you sure? Because you know what is going to happen if I get a computer. I'll be playing on it all the time." She said, "No. I want you to go buy one." So we turned around and went back to the mall.
That was the start of my journey into the world of computers.
End of Side Story.
As I explained in the post "Boppin' with Bif during the Power Plant Downsizing", the company offered an early retirement package for everyone 55 years old and older. They would give them full benefits to leave. This meant that our Electrical Supervisor, Leroy Godfrey, as well as the assistant plant manager, Bill Moler and the Plant Manager, Eldon Waugh were all going to retire some time in August 1987.
We had a retirement party for Leroy Godfrey out in the country at Diana Brien's house. A bunch of the electricians were there including Mark Meeks, who Leroy knew at the time was the one that was going to be laid off. Mark commented about that later when he was told that he was losing his job that Leroy had sat there and smiled at him while we were at the party. Mark knew Leroy didn't like him, but hadn't expected to be the one to go since everyone thought it would be Gary Wehunt, since he was the newest member in the shop.
I explained in the post, "The Passing of an Old School Power Plant Man — Leroy Godfrey" what Leroy's management style was like. It was very top-down, if you know what I mean. It was like, "Because I told you so." No need to explain anything. That was the world of Power Plant Management up to that point.
I think Corporate Headquarters realized that this needed to change in order for the company to compete in a world where electric companies could no longer count on the Corporation Commission to guarantee a sustainable electric rate or even a set number of customers. The world of electric power was changing rapidly and the company needed to move on from the mentality that it could be run like a "good ol' boys" club.
It is easier to teach young dogs new tricks than older and crankier ones. It looked to me like this was a logical choice when looking back using hindsight. I think the company was making a bold move. I don't think they really had much of a choice if they wanted to survive.
So, we had the main retirement party at the plant where people stood up and told stories about the old guys that were retiring. Nothing much happened there except the part where Leroy Godfrey's daughter stood up and said that we just had to work with him, while she had to live with him… see the post about Leroy above for the full story about that.
Then the following Monday. I believe it was August 17, 1987, everyone was told to meet in the main break room for a meeting with our new management. That was when we were introduced to our new plant manager, Ron Kilman.
I remember a certain part of the meeting very well. Ron said something funny. It didn't matter exactly what he said. I don't even remember what it was. Probably something self-deprecating. I leaned over to Charles Foster, who had been my foreman for a while (on that day, it was officially Andy Tubbs). I said, "I didn't know Plant Managers could tell jokes!"
Charles looked back at me and I raised my eyebrows and tilted my head while the corners of my mouth went down. — This was one of the signals I had learned while carpooling with Bud Schoonover when I needed to communicate with Dick Dale without saying anything out loud (see the post: Carpooling with Bud Schoonover". This particular expression meant, "Maybe this won't be such a bad thing."
Ron Kilman remained the plant manager at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma for the next 7 years. The stories that I will post during this next year will all be at least partially from this time period. During this time, there were some decisions that Ron made that I applauded, and others that even he would admit he wished he hadn't made.
All in all, I think that Ron has a good heart and that those times when he did make a rash decision, it was evident that he was falling back to his "management training" and not managing from his heart. Old School management training left a lot to be desired.
During the 7 years from 1987 to 1994, the power plant saw a lot of changes. Some I have alluded to already. Such as the move to computerize everything. The other was a total change in how management works. Or at least that was the attempt.
People were willing to step out of their regular day-to-day jobs and try new things that they thought would help the plant. Many of these things were successful. Some of them failed, but not so miserably as they would have if the earlier management had been around. The employees felt as if they had more of a say in how the plant ran instead of feeling like they were just a bunch of tools running around fixing things.
I have a quote from Ron Kilman that said it all one day after a catastrophe had occurred. It summed up his management style as opposed to his assistant manager, Ben Brandt. I will relay the exact story later, but for now I'll just say that when Ben Brandt saw what happened, the first thing that he said was, "Who did this?" When Ron Kilman saw what had happened, the first thing he said was, "How can we prevent this from happening again?"
Ben's approach was from the old school of thought. Blame and punish the culprit. Later when we were drastically changing the way process improvements took place, my favorite quote from Ben Brandt is, "I am the obstacle! We aren't going to change because I say so." We all had to agree. He was definitely the obstacle.
Ron's approach was one more like a leader. "Let's get the job done right." Sure, he is human, so the decisions weren't always perfect, but I think in general, he was leading where other people may have been dragging.
Well… I will say no more for now… I look forward to writing stories about this time period during this next year. I'm sure there are a lot of those at the plant just as eager to see how I portray the different events that took place during this time.
Comments from the original post:
One day, a fellow operator and I brought in our old slide rules, just to show. Not the round one like yours, but straight and mine had a leather case. A young engineer came hurrying through the control room and said, "I need a calculator – QUICK!" so I handed him my leather case & he ran out, about 30 seconds later he came back with a puzzled look on his face & said "No, I don't need to MEASURE something, I need to CALCULATE something" We all had a hearty laugh!
Comments from the last repost:
I loved the old Heath Kits. I built a 14 watt amplifier and an AM/FM receiver that I used for years (both were the tube type – pre-transistor). It was always satisfying to invest a few hours, save a few dollars, learn some new skills, and enjoy a product you couldn't buy at a store.
Bohn's Boner and the Power Plant Precipitator Computer
Originally posted on January 11, 2014:
Up front, I would like to clarify the title so that those who are quickly perusing articles looking for something salacious won't have to read too far before they realize this isn't what they are seeking. The word "Boner" in this headline refers to a "joke" played on a Plant Engineer by the name of George Bohn at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. When I was a boy we had a joke book called the "Omnibus Book of Boners". Most of my life I never thought about the word "Boner" as having another meaning. Which, after this joke was played might have explained the expression on George's face.
In an earlier Post "Power Plant Humor and Joking With Gene Day" I explained that when playing a Power Plant joke, the longer it takes to play a simple joke, the better the effect. I think the reason for this is that when the person realizes that a joke has been played on them by a fellow Power Plant Man and even though it was simple, the person went through the effort over a long period of time, just to make you smile for a moment. Then you know that this person must truly be a good friend. Who else would waste countless hours on someone over days, weeks, or even months, just to make someone smile once?
Well…. Bohn's Boner lasted for over six months! Yeah. Six months, at least.
I saw the opportunity arise one day after we had received a new hard drive for precipitator computer for Unit 2. We had the computers for a couple of years after we went to digital controls in the precipitator before the hard drive crashed. This happened to be a project that George Bohn had managed. He was the project manager and had overseen the installation of the precipitator controls, which included the two precipitator computers in the control room. One for each unit. They sat around behind the big control panel that you see when you watch an older movie about a Power Plant Control Room, like the China Syndrome.
Anyway, each of the computers had 30 Megabyte hard drives. Yeah. You heard that right! 30 Megabytes. That's not a typo. Not Gigabytes… nope. Megabytes. Just this morning at Dell, I received an e-mail with a file attached that was over 30 Megabytes in size (Thanks Norma). I'm talking about an IBM AT computer:
Well, the Unit 2 precipitator computer was used to monitor all of the 84 control cabinets in the Precipitator control room. It indicated how much voltage and amperage were on each cabinet, as well as the spark rate, and the setting on each cabinet. It was really a great step up. I'm sure today you can probably do that from your phone while you are sitting in a movie theater just before they tell you to silence your "Cell Phone Now" and stop texting your neighbor. Back then, it was amazing.
All the operator had to do was go over to the computer, pull up the screen (this was before Windows, but the program was running by default), and type the keyboard command to tell it to print and "voila", it would print out all that information. The operator could look at it to see if there was a problem, and if not, he just saved it with all the other reports he was supposed to create during his shift.
Believe it or not. Before this time, the operator actually walked up to all of the 84 cabinets on each unit and looking at meters on the cabinet wrote down the voltage and amperage of each cabinet on a form. You can imagine how much happier they were to be able to print it all out in the control room. Hours and hours saved each week.
So, when the 30 Megabyte hard drive crashed George Bohn ordered a new hard drive from the IT department in Oklahoma City. A couple of weeks later, we received the new hard drive from the city. George gave it to me and asked me to install it in the computer.
When I installed the hard drive, I found that it had already been formatted. All I had to do was install the program and we were good to go. I backed up the program from the Unit 1 computer and copied it onto the new hard drive using a floppy disk. Yeah. Programs were a lot smaller then. A 360 Kilobyte floppy disk was all that was needed to hold the entire Precipitator program.
I noticed right away that instead of being the 30 Megabytes we had expected, there was only 20 Megabytes on the drive. That was all right with me. 20 Megabytes would be enough so that we didn't have to back anything up very often.
As I was installing the program and testing it, and going through the code figuring out how to change Unit 1 to Unit 2, I had an idea…. At the command prompt, I typed "D:" and hit enter. You know what I was checking, right? D colon, and enter…..
sure enough. there was a D drive on this hard drive. Another 20 Megabytes were on this partition. You see. This was actually a 40 Megabyte hard drive that had been partitioned as two 20 megabyte drives.
It was at this point that I thought I would play a little joke on George. I figured he would come and look at this computer and at first he would find that the new hard drive was only a 20 Megabyte drive instead of the 30 Megabyte drive that he had ordered. I also figured that like me, he would think about it for a minute and then check to see if there was an extra partition and would find the extra drive.
So I thought I would leave him a little present. I went to D Drive and at the command prompt (gee… the only thing you had was a command prompt. You didn't even call it a command prompt then. You called it a DOS prompt) that looked like this: D:> I typed – "label d: Bohns Boner" For all you older DOS people, you know what this did, right? It labeled the D drive volume name "Bohns Boner". At the time I think we were on DOS 4.0 or something close to that. The volume length was limited to 11 characters and Bohns Boner took exactly 11 characters. The label couldn't be longer than that.
Now, all I had to do was call up George Bohn, tell him I had installed the hard drive in the precipitator computer and it was up and running and go to the electric shop and wait for him to come down with a smile on his face over the name of the second drive on the computer. So I did. I told Charles Foster and Terry Blevins.
After the reorganization, Tom Gibson, our Electric Supervisor had decided that Terry Blevins would maintain the precipitator on Unit 2, and I would maintain Unit 1, which was great for me, because I was no longer working on both of them by myself. So, Charles and I were waiting for George to arrive in the electric shop office. It didn't take long.
George came in the office and said, "Did you see that they only gave us a 20 Megabyte hard drive instead of a 30 Megabyte drive. (Oh. So, he hadn't found the second partition). I replied, "Yeah. I noticed that." George was a little perturbed that he didn't get what he ordered. He said he was going to contact them and have them send us a 30 Megabyte drive. We had paid for it. I told him that he should. Especially since we had paid for it (keeping a straight concerned look on my face).
Anyway, a couple of weeks went by and there was no new hard drive, and George hadn't said anything more about it. I thought he might have eventually found the second drive, but then he would say something like "I can't believe they didn't send us the right hard drive" and I would know that he still hadn't figured it out.
One day the operators came to me and pulled me aside and asked me if there was some way when they were on the night shift if they could use the precipitator computer to create documents. At this time PCs were pretty sparse. The only good computers in the control room were these two precipitator computers and the Shift Supervisor's office. the Precipitator computers just sat there monitoring the precipitator all the time, even when no one cared.
The plant had purchased so many licenses to use Word Perfect, a word processor that was the "in thing" before Windows and Word came around. So, I installed Word Perfect for them on the extra drive on the Unit 2 precipitator computer. That is, Bohns Boner. I explained to them that they could only use it when George Bohn was not around, because he didn't know the drive existed and I wanted him to find it himself someday.
Everyone agreed. All the Control Room operators that were at all interested in creating documents, like Jim Cave and Dave Tarver and others, knew about Bohns Boner, and knew that it was a secret.
The Control room had a laser printer installed next to the Shift Supervisor's office so they could print out Clearances and have them look nice. They had some new Clearance system they installed, and this came with it. So, the next question was… Is there a way we can print our documents out using the Laser Printer instead of the clunky Dot Matrix printer tied to the Precipitator computer?
I ordered a 50 foot Printer cable (I paid for it out of my own pocket) and kept it coiled up under the small desk where the precipitator computer sat and explained that they could just disconnect the dot matrix printer on the back of the computer and plug the other end into the Laser Printer and they could print out nice neat looking documents. But… They had to do it at night or when they were sure that George Bohn was not around because he still didn't know the extra drive existed. Everyone agreed. They would have to string the printer cable across the Control Room floor to reach the laser printer.
Like I said earlier. this went on for well over 6 months. It seemed like almost a year. Then one day, George Bohn came down to the Electric Shop office while Charles and I were sitting there for lunch. He said that he had asked Oklahoma City about the hard drive again, and they had insisted that they had sent the correct hard drive to our plant. Then we could see a light go on in his head. He said, "Do you suppose that they partitioned the disk into two drives?" (Bingo! He had figured it out). I said, "Could be."
Charles and I sat there and looked at him while we ate our lunch. The cherry tomatoes Charles had given me tasted especially good with my ham and cheese sandwich that day. I knew that we were finally only minutes away from the end of the joke we had been playing on George for the past so many months. George leaned back in the chair with his thin long legs stretched out and his hands behind his head. I could tell he was thinking about it.
Then he rose from his chair and headed out the door. Charles and I smiled at each other. We both waited. A few minutes later George came back in the office. He had found Bohns Boner. You see. When you went to a drive back then on the command prompt, the first thing you would see was the volume name. So as soon as he typed the D colon and enter, it would have said "Bohns Boner".
George sat down in a chair. He didn't say anything. He just sat there with a straight face as if he didn't know what to think. I thought…. well, he is an Engineer. Maybe he doesn't know what to do when Power Plant Men play jokes on them. He looked like he couldn't decide whether to be upset or glad that we had an even bigger hard drive than he ordered. I don't know if he ever figured out that the longer the joke takes, the more we liked him.
I guess George felt foolish that it took him so long to find that extra drive. I suppose he might have thought he knew me well enough that if there had been an extra drive on the computer, when he first mentioned it, I would have told him that it was partitioned into two drives, so he didn't give it a second thought. I guess he didn't know me as well as he thought.
Anyway, after that, he never said anything about the operators using the computer for other uses than monitoring the precipitator, which was always a problem before. George never mentioned the hard drive again. I don't remember now if I later changed the volume name on the drive. It seemed like not long after the computers were upgraded from the IBM AT to something like a XT 286.
Oh. I had another joke I played on George. The other one lasted for years, and he never figured it. I will write about that one later. That one wasn't so much of a joke as it was out of necessity. I won't say anymore about it now. You'll have to wait at least another week or two.
Dick Dale and the Power Plant Printer Romance
Originally posted January 17, 2014. I added more to the story:
When I first moved to Ponca City in 1986 I carpooled each day to the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma with Dick Dale, Jim Heflin and Bud Schoonover (See the post: "Carpooling Adventures with Bud Schoonover"). Dick Dale had moved to Ponca City a couple of years earlier after his divorce. He didn't want to continue living in Stillwater where he felt as if everyone knew about his tragic situation. We had been friends from the first day we met (which is often the case with Power Plant Men) when I was a summer help working out of the garage and he worked in the tool room and warehouse.
I wrote about Dick Dale this past Christmas, when I talked about his situation (See the post: "Harmonizing with Dick Dale on Power Plant Christmas Harmonicas"). I knew that even though it was a few years later, Richard was still feeling the impact from this emotional trauma. One day I found the opportunity to play a "Power Plant" joke on him that I thought might help lift his spirits.
I recently wrote another post about how I had installed dumb terminals around the plant so that regular workers would be able to access the mainframe computer downtown in Corporate Headquarters in order to see their work orders, or look up parts in the warehouse, etc. (See the post: "Working Smarter with Power Plant Dumb Terminals"). In most places where I installed terminals, I also installed large IBM printers that printed using continuous feed paper.
For those of you who remember, at first most dot matrix printers would feed paper from a box underneath them. they had holes down both sides of the paper where the sprockets would rotate and paper would come rolling out the top of the printer.
Ok. Here is a quick one paragraph side story…
One day when my son was 5 years old, we had to wait a while in an airport. We were sitting in a row of seats at the gate waiting. My son kept popping up slowly, jerking as he rose, from behind the row of seats and would lay over the seat back and end up head down on the chair. After doing this a few times, my wife Kelly who was becoming slightly annoyed asked him what he was doing. He said, "I'm paper coming out of the printer". Of course, this cracked us all up.
Anyway, back to the story. By the time I had to add the dumb terminals and printers to the Garage and Warehouse, I had already been playing around on the mainframe learning all sorts of ways to get into trouble. — Well, what else was I going to do during lunch while Charles Foster and I talked about movies and stuff? I had a personal user account on the mainframe that basically gave me "God Access". They didn't really have anything like "Network Security" back then. — This was 1988.
Back then, we also didn't have anything called "Email" either. It wasn't until 1989 that CompuServe first offered real Internet e-mail to its users. When we wanted to send something to someone in the company, we either printed it out and put in an intra-company envelope and sent it by "snail" mail, or we could find out what printer they used and get the ID for the printer and send it to them. It was a code like: P1234.
Well. I had been playing with this text editor on the Honeywell mainframe called FRED. This stood for FRiendly EDitor. For those of you who know UNIX, this was pretty much the same as the VI Editor found on UNIX mainframes. The commands were the same. Today, users of Microsoft Word would be horrified to find out what you had to go through to create a document back then.
I had been practicing using this editor, and found that by using the special escape codes for the printer, I could create documents that would come out looking pretty neat. So, I had created some templates that would make it look like I was printing a Memo from some mainframe program. That was about the time that I installed the printer in the garage.
So, I created a big long document that would print out on the garage printer as soon as I connected the printer to the network. It went on and on about how the printer wasn't happy about being placed in such a dusty environment and how it refused to be cooperative until it was moved to a cleaner place. It would spit out a bunch of sheets of paper, printing protest after protest.
Then it ended up by saying that if it wasn't moved right away, it was going to shut down in 10 minutes and it started counting down by 30 second intervals. Then at the last minute, it counted down by 15 seconds until it counted down the last 10 seconds by feeding a sheet of paper for each second while it was counting… then it paused at the last second. Finally, it printed out at the end a concession that since it was obviously not going to be moved to someplace cleaner, it might as well give up and be cooperative.
When I installed the printer in the office in the automotive garage, I knew it would take about 30 seconds to connect the first time, and by that time, I was outside making my way back to the electric shop. By the time I arrived back in the electric shop Charles Patten, the foreman in the garage was calling me on the gray phone. The gray phone is the plant PA system:
Of course, I knew why. I answered the phone and Charles told me that something was wrong with the printer. It kept shooting paper out of it and wouldn't stop. He had even turned it off, but when he turned it back on, it still kept feeding paper out. I told him that sounded pretty strange to me and I would be right over to see what was going on. I took my time returning to the garage giving the printer time to throw it's tantrum.
By the time I returned, the printer had stopped ranting about being installed in a dirty environment and had given up it's protest. Charles said that it finally stopped. I walked over to the printer and took the pile of hundred or so pages that it had printed out, and tore them off the printer and walked out with them. I don't even know if Charles had paid any attention to what the printer was saying.
I think I was the only person that knew that I had just "attempted" to play a joke on Charles. After all, as the paper was feeding out it was carefully collecting into a nice stack in front of the printer on the floor, and unless someone picked up the stack and looked at it, they wouldn't know that anything was even printed on it. So, in this case, the joke may have been on me. But then again, Power Plant Men are like that. If they figure a joke is being played on them, then they figure out how to turn it around so that the joker is the one that has the joke played on them. Maybe that was the case here. Charles Patten was probably one of the most intelligent foremen at the plant, so it was possible.
Anyway, back to Dick Dale. I installed the printer in the warehouse and Dick Dale, Darlene Mitchell, Mike Gibbs and Bud Schoonover were happy to be connected to the Inventory program on the mainframe….. um… yeah. sure they were…… especially Bud.
Bud Schoonover was the person that when it was his turn to run the tool room would not give you something if it was the last one. So, if I needed a flashlight and it was the last one, and I asked Bud for a flashlight, he would say that he couldn't give it to me. Why? You might ask. Well, he would explain that if he gave the last one away, he would have to order some more. Bud didn't like ordering things on the computer. So, in order to keep from having to order anything he simply didn't give away the last one of any item.
Anyway. I decided one Monday during my regular lunch time computer educational moments to send a letter over to the warehouse printer addressed to Dick Dale. It was from an anonymous woman. The letter sounded like it was from someone that really had a thing for Richard and remembered how they used to work together. It also mentioned other people, like Mike Gibbs and Pat Braden and about how they used to hang around each other.
Since this was a fictitious character, I could say anything I wanted, but I wanted to put it in a time period back when I was still a summer help. Well… It wasn't long before Dick Dale called me on the gray phone (no. I won't post another picture of the gray phone here. I think you get the idea). He asked me to come over to the warehouse.
When I arrived, Richard showed me the letter. He was excited about it. He was trying to figure out who it could be. He thought about the people that had moved from the plant to Corporate Headquarters and wondered if it was one of them. I thought for a little while, and I couldn't come up with who it might be (obviously), since it was me.
The next day at lunch I sent another letter to his printer. I mentioned more about the "old days" working at the plant. On the way home Richard showed it to me. I could tell that he was really excited about this. I held back my smile, but inside it felt real good to see that Richard had finally come back to life. For the past couple of years, he had been so down. Now some woman was paying attention to him, and actually was telling him that she had always liked him.
Darlene Mitchell sent a letter to the printer ID I had sent in the letter to Richard, saying the following:
Dear Ghost Writer,
This has been the most exciting thing that's happened in the warehouse in a long time. We await your messages. Dick is really trying hard to figure this out, and if you don't give him a little hint, his little old brains are going to get fried.
He also requests that you send his messages to his printer only, that way I won't be able to send my message back. He takes all the fun out of everything. P)24 is his number, and if you can't get a response out of him, I'll be glad to put my two cents in.
I'm sure Dick would like to see you too. Maybe we can get him headed in your direction, if you tell me where that is.
So, long, see you in the funny papers.
<end of message>
On Thursday Richard called me and asked me to come over to the warehouse. He showed me the letter he had received that day. He said he was too excited. He just had to find out who it was that was sending him these letters. He said that since I knew everything there was to know about computers (a slight exaggeration), he asked me to see if I could find out where the letters were coming from.
I told him I would do what I could to see if I could track down who was sending the letters. On the way home that day, he asked me if I had any luck. I told him I was still looking into it. I told him I thought there might be a way to find a log somewhere that would tell me.
So, after lunch on Friday I walked over to the warehouse. When I entered, I signaled to Richard that I wanted to talk to him. — Remember. Richard and I had developed facial signals while carpooling with Bud Schoonover so that all we had to do was glance at each other and we instantly knew what each other was saying…
Richard and I stepped outside of the warehouse where we could be alone. He asked me if I had found the person sending him the letters. I told him I had (I knew I had to do this right or I would lose a good friend, so I said), "Yes. I have."
I could see the look of excitement in his face. So I looked straight at him and I said, "I have been sending these letters to you." He was stunned. He said, "What?" I said, "Richard. I have been sending them to you."
I could see that he was very disappointed. After all. No two people could read each other's expressions better than me and Richard. We practiced them every day. The corners of his mouth went down. The middle went up. Edges of the eyes went down. Eyes began to water. Yep. He was disappointed to say the least.
I told him I was sorry to get his hopes up. I put on the saddest look I could muster. Inside I wasn't so sad. Actually I was pretty happy. I knew this was a tough moment for Richard, but he had spent an entire week flying high. For the first time in a long time, Richard had hope. A couple of hours of disappointment was well worth this past week.
I patted him on the back and he turned to walk back into the warehouse despondent. I went back to the electric shop.
As for my part, I continued sending Dick Dale printed messages from time to time. Just goofy messages like the following:
Dear Richard,
Sometimes when I type letters I find that the words I use are not always the typical type that I would use if I wrote a letter. The letters that I make when I write a letter aren't the type of letters that I use when I type a letter. When I write a letter, the letters in the words are sometimes hard to distinguish, but the letters I type when i'm typing a letter are the type of letters that stand out clearly and uniformly. I can't really say that when I type I'm right, or when I write I'm right, because I usually type a different type of letter than I write when I'm writing a letter. I typically use a different type of words when I'm typing than I use when I'm writing, so I really can't say that writing is right when a typical typed letter is just as right as writing. That is just the type of person I am.
Typical Typist
After a few more days, Darlene Mitchell and Dick Dale began sending me letters indicating that the warehouse workers had been taken hostage, and they had a list of hostage demands. I would write back to them. The hostage letters and my replies would make up an entire blog post just by themselves.
So, what followed this episode? Well. Within a few weeks Dick Dale had attended an event at the Presbyterian Church in Ponca City where he met a very nice woman, Jill Cowan. He began dating her, and within the year they were married on November 13, 1988.
I like to think that I had given him the kick in the pants that he needed at the time that he needed it. For that one week where he had hope, he believed that someone else really cared for him (which I really did, just not in the way he was thinking). If he could believe that, then maybe it could really be true, even if in this case it turned out to only be one of his best friends.
I know that Dick Dale lived happily ever after. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote a post about Dick Dale about a time when I gave a Christmas present to Dick Dale, Christmas 1983. Well. as it turned out, my friend Richard was presented to Saint Peter at the gates of Heaven 25 years later on Christmas Day, 2008, 20 happy years after his marriage to Jill. I don't really miss him. He is always with me in my heart to this day.
Power Plant Paradox of Front to Back and Back to Front
Originally posted February 8, 2014:
After the downsizing in 1987 some new engineers were assigned to the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. I wasn't used to an engineer actually pausing to listen to what I was saying. I remember the first time I said something sort of out of the ordinary and Doug Link stopped and asked me why I thought that. The usual response was to roll their eyes as if I was some dumb electrician that almost knew how to lace my boots correctly… Ok… Lacing your boots isn't as easy as it looks…. especially when you put them on in the dark in the morning before you leave the house.
Now, before you think "Front to Back and Back to Front" has to do with lacing up my boots, you are mistaken.
Back to Doug Link. I was surprised when he actually stopped and asked me to explain myself. I know I had said something that had sounded a little bombastic, but what I believed to be true anyway. So, I sat down and explained it to him. It was something that ran contrary to what a person might think was logical. Once I explained it to him, he said he understood what I meant. — Wow. What kind of new engineers are they breeding out there (I thought). Well he did go to Missouri University at the same time I did, we just didn't know each other at the time.
Another engineer that showed up at the plant was Toby O'Brien. Even the maintenance department recognized right away that Toby would listen to you. Not only would he listen to the crazy rantings of an electrician like me, but he would also ask advice from mechanics! And… (now brace yourself for this) Welders! I believe that if he could corner a janitor, he probably would have listened to them as well…. because… well… I was just a janitor pretending to be an electrician, and he listened to me all the time.
So, what does this all have to do with "Front to Back and Back to Front"? Well. Almost nothing. Except that these new engineers knew about a secret that we were all keeping from George Bohn, another engineer that I talked about in the post "Bohn's Boner and the Power Plant Precipitator Computer" In that post we had kept from George that the computer had an extra drive partitioned on the hard drive for a while. In this post, I will talk about a much more significant secret (at least in George's eyes).
With the reorganization Terry Blevins worked on one precipitator and I worked on the other.
For those of you who don't know, the precipitator is what takes the "smoke" out of the exhaust from the boiler so that it can be collected in hoppers and sent up to the coalyard to silos where trucks would come and haul it away to make highways.
The electric Supervisor Tom Gibson thought that a little competition would be good between the two teams to see who could make their precipitator work the best. Only it didn't work out that way. Terry had one way of doing things and I had a completely opposite way of approaching a problem. Terry would study a problem. Analyze it, and do everything he could to understand what was going on. Then he would go out and make a major change. I on the other hand would make incremental small changes and observe the effects. Then work toward what seemed to work best.
Between the two of us approaching a problem from completely different points of view, we were able to come up with solutions that apart I don't think either of us would have ever thought about. So, we became a team instead.
Now for the boring part of the story. I am going to explain Back to Front….. With the new digital controls, we could set up the controls so that each of the 84 precipitator transformers could be backed down one KV (kilovolt) at a time in order from the front cabinets to the back ones. Then it would start from the front again backing the power on the cabinets down slightly each time. — I know this is boring. The front of the precipitator is where the exhaust enters the precipitator. The back is where the exhaust leaves the precipitator.
The cabinets would do this until the amount of ash going out of the smoke stack hit a certain limit that was 1/4 of the legal limit (the legal limit was 20% opacity. So, we controlled the cabinets to keep the opacity at 5%). Opacity is the amount of light that is blocked by the ash coming out of the smokestack.
Well, if the opacity went too high (say 6.5%) the back cabinets would start powering all the way back up, and it would work its way toward the front of the precipitator from the back until the opacity went down below the set limit. — sound good? Well… after running this way for a while we realized that this wasn't so good.
What ended up happening was that the front cabinets which normally collected 90% of the ash were always powered down and the back cabinets were powered up, because they would power up each time the opacity would spike. So the ash collection was shifted from the front to the back. This meant that if there was a puff of ash going out of the stack, it probably came from the back of the precipitator and there wasn't anything that could be done to stop it.
We asked George if we could reverse the Front to Back powering down of the cabinets so that it went from Back to Front. That way the back of the precipitator would be powered down most of the time and the front would be powered up. This would keep the back half of the precipitator clean and if there was a need to power them up because of some disturbance in the boiler, the back of the precipitator would be in good shape to handle the extra ash.
George, however, insisted that since the EPA had tested the precipitator with the new controls when they were setup to go from front to back, we couldn't risk changing it, or the EPA could come back and make us put scrubbers on the plant. We were grandfathered into not needing scrubbers and we didn't want to go through that mess and cost that would have raised electric rates for everyone.
This was frustrating because we could easily see that every hour or so we would be sending big puffs out of the smokestack on the account of the inherent flaw of backing the cabinets down using a Front to back method. Even though we knew the engineers would blow their top if they found out, we called the EPA one day and asked them about it. The EPA said they didn't care as long as the precipitator wasn't physically being altered and we were adjusting the controls to maximize operations.
So, one day when I was in the Precipitator Control Room, I walked over the main processor unit in the middle of the room where the seven sections of 12 cabinets each plugged in. I took the A row cable and swapped it with G. I took B and swapped it with F, C and swapped it with E. D I just left it where it was since it was in the middle.
Then I walked to each Cabinet in a section and swapped the eeprom chip from cabinet 1 and put it in 12. And from cabinet 2 and put it in 11, and so on. Without leaving the precipitator control room, I had just changed the order of the cabinets backing down from "Front to Back" to "Back to Front". As far as the control room was concerned, nothing changed (unless you looked closely at the voltages on the cabinets on the computer. The front cabinets usually were around 30kv while the back were closer to 45kv).
So, now that the cabinets were backing down from back to front, everything worked a lot smoother. No more hourly puffs and wild power swings as cabinets were released. As long as George didn't know, he was happy. The precipitator suddenly was working very well. So well in fact that one winter while the unit was at full load (510 Megawatts), the precipitator was using only 70 Kilowatts of power and the opacity was well below the 5% threshold.
The space heaters in the precipitator control room were using over 120 kilowatts of power. More than the entire precipitator. This is important because normally the precipitator used more power than any other piece of equipment in the plant. It was not unusual before we had the back down working for one precipitator to use 3 Megawatts of power. That is 3,000 Kilowatts.
Then one day in 1992 an electrical engineer Intern (who later became a full time engineer) came in the precipitator control room with George Bohn while we were calibrating the cabinets one at a time. George began explaining to Steve Wilson how the precipitator controls worked. We were in the front section (G row). George introduced Steve to us and started explaining to him about the back down and how it worked.
Just then, the cabinet that he was showing him powered up. — oops. This was a front row cabinet and in George's mind, they should be the last to power up. He looked around and could see that the cabinets in F row were still powered down. I thought, "The jig is up." George said, "That's not right! That shouldn't happen!" (Ok George. We've only been doing this for 3 years and you are just now noticing?).
So, I asked him what the problem was (knowing full well). He explained that the cabinet in G row had just powered up. — You could tell when a cabinet was powered down because a certain light in the lower left corner of the display would be on. I looked at the cabinet and the Primary current limit light was lit. Obviously not in the back down mode.
So, I said this, "George, this cabinet still is in the back down mode. You just can't tell because it is also hitting the primary current limit and both lights won't light up at the same time." — Geez… I thought…. would he believe this hair brain explanation? George nodded. Then he went on to explain to Steve what I just said to him as if it was something he knew all the time (even though I sort of just made it up).
A short time after Steve and George left, I found Steve and explained to him that we really do power down the precipitator from back to front instead of front to back, because front to back doesn't work, and I explained to him why it works better and why we don't tell George Bohn. Steve was another sensible engineer that knew how to listen and learn. I enjoyed the little time I spent working with him.
Well…. The efficiency of the precipitators caught the attention of EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute), and they wanted to come and study our precipitator controls. Not only the back down feature we were using but also a pulse capability that Environmental Controls had that allowed you to power off for so many electric pulses and then power on again.
So, when the EPRI scientists showed up to test our precipitators for a couple of weeks trying the different modes of operation, I knew that it was important for them to really understand how we were operating the precipitators. So, after George had taken them to the computers in the control room and explained the back to front back down mode. I took them aside one at a time and explained to them that even though the computer looked like it was backing down from front to back, it was really backing down from back to front.
I explained to them why we had to do it that way, and I also explained to them why we didn't let George know about it. They all seemed to understand, and for the next two weeks no one from EPRI let the cat out of the bag.
To this day I don't think George knew that we had swapped the direction of the back down from "front to back" to "Back to front". At least not until he reads this post.
Comments from the original post:
Now I know why George came into my office one day and begged me to have you committed!
Great story!
I really appreciate how you describe the two methods of problem solving, and how together you could come up with solutions that neither one of you may have thought of.
Power Plant Pilfering and Being Peeved with Peavler
Originally posted April 5, 2014:
Today, work ended in a strange way. I was working away at Dell when I had a call with a business partner to go over some configuration of our timekeeping application. When I joined the call, the person on the other end of the line, who usually sounded like a normal woman with a slightly Hispanic accent sounded more like an insect alien with a very nervous tic.
I tried several quick remedies on my computer to resolve the audio issues I was experiencing. You see, at Dell, when we use the telephone, we are actually using our computer with a headset attached. After shutting down a few processes that I knew were not necessary in the hope of clearing up our communication, I thought that maybe rebooting my computer would be the simple solution. That was the lesson I had learned back at the gas-powered power plant in Harrah Oklahona in 1985.
Ellis Rook had told me back then that he didn't mess with trying to figure out why the phone system wasn't working. Whenever there was a problem, he preferred to just reload the program from disk, which took about a half an hour. No worries that all the phones in the plant would be down for a half an hour as the Rolm Phone computer was rebooting. So, I rebooted my system, since restarting the communication program didn't work.
When my computer rebooted and I attempted to log in, when the screen would go blank just before the moment when you would expect the wallpaper to show up, my computer would indicate that it was logging me off and then would shutdown only to restart again…. Drats! …and I had this important call with my coworker that I was sure had not really changed into the alien that had been talking to me moments before.
I tried this a couple more times, and each time the computer would shutdown and restart. So, I swiveled around in my chair and turned to my current manager who was sitting across the bullpen cube from me and I said, "My computer has crashed." It just keep restarting. She replied, "Go take it down to the computer clinic and have them fix it. They are great! They will fix you up right away.
On a side note, I just want to add that my current manager at Dell has been the absolute most influential manager I have ever met next to Charles Foster. She has perfected the art of "Expanding her bubble". Charles taught me this technique many years ago.
So, on a side note of a side note, let me just tell you what my former foreman Charles Foster at the Power Plant did once. He ordered some equipment for everyone in the electric shop which ran into a few "extra" dollars. When he was called on the carpet to explain why he thought he had the authority to make this purchase, he explained it this way:
"When I went to 'manager training' they told me that during your career you will have times where it will be necessary to perform activities that you are not sure you are able to perform, so you should go ahead and try them. If you get your hand slapped, you just pull back and don't do that again.' This is called 'Expanding your bubble'. I was just expanding my bubble." He said Ben Brandt, the assistant plant manager, looked at him with a blank stare for a moment, and then told him that he was free to go. Evidently, according to the listening devices that we had hidden in his office, Ben turned to Tom Gibson, the Electric Supervisor, and said, "That's a pretty good explanation."
I bring this encounter up, because my current manager, Ali Levin, of whom I also have the greatest respect, just recently had an opportunity to expand her bubble. She was so successful that those around her that know what she has accomplished just stare in awe at her. I predict that within the next decade this young lady will have become the CIO (Chief Information Officer) of a Fortune 500 company (mark my word).
So, what does this all have to do with Charles Peavler and Power Plant Pilfering? Well. The final verdict from the super technicians down in our computer repair lab, said that since it was Friday afternoon, I wouldn't be able to have my computer back in working order until Monday morning. Which meant that I would have to go all weekend without being able to log in and perform feats of magic on my laptop.
Ok. I was resigned to go home early and wait patiently until Monday morning when I could begin popping up various applications and flipping between them and the multiple Instant Message windows talking to various business customers throughout the day as I performed the satisfying dance of my day-to-day job. So. I left work early.
This evening as I sat down to create a post about Power Plant Men and my previous life working as an electrician at a Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahama, the sudden loss of my computer flashed me back to a time when someone that was working with me experienced a similar loss. Instead of a laptop. This electrician had lost a set of "Jumpers".
Ok. These jumpers don't look like much, I know. But jumpers are almost as important to a plant electrician as a laptop is to an IT developer at Dell. That is, you just can't get your work done without it.
So, it was either Donald Relf or Bob Eno who was working with me on Friday, March 29, 1993. During overhaul, we had been calibrating precipitator control cabinets all day. Much like today, April 5, 2014 when my computer died. At the end of the day as we were packing up our equipment Bob or Donald, I don't remember, saw me leave my tool bucket next to the old typewriter stand that we were using as a portable workbench. He asked me if it was safe to leave our tool buckets there over the weekend.
I assured him that the coal-fired plant in North Central Oklahoma hired only "top-notch" Power Plant Men. His tools would be perfectly safe sitting out in the Precipitator control room over the weekend. I was so confident because I had always left my tools where I was working in the precipitator during overhaul and I had never had anything stolen. If anything, someone may have left me a present of chocolate behind only because they knew that I always did favors for chocolate.
You can imagine my surprise when we returned to the Precipitator Control Room on Unit 1 on Monday morning only to find that Bob (or Donald) had their jumpers missing from their tool bucket. We each used 5 gallon buckets to carry our tools. Mine had been untouched. No extra chocolate that day, but no unsavory fingerprints were detected.
As it turned out, we relied on Bob's (or Donald's) jumpers to do our job, so we actually had to return to the electric shop and create a new set of jumpers for him. I felt so ashamed. After all, I had so proudly explained that only those with the greatest integrity worked at our plant, and he didn't have to worry about leaving his tools, and here I was having to cover for his losses. This was the only time in the 20 years I worked at the Power Plant where someone had stolen something from a tool bucket when they weren't purposely playing a joke on me.
When I found time that day, I went to the control room and asked the Shift Supervisor if he could tell me who worked as the Unit 1 auxiliary operator over the weekend. I knew that this would narrow the culprit down to three people. He looked through his logs and said that Darrell Low, Charles Peavler and Jim Kanelakos had Unit 1 over the weekend.
Knowing how the shifts worked, I knew that each of these people had walked through the Unit 1 precipitator exactly 3 times over the weekend, before we returned on Monday morning. I also knew that no one else would have ventured to stroll through the Precipitator control room who was working over the weekend on overhaul. I knew this because of all the hundreds of hours I had already spent in this control room over the weekend, only one operator per shift ever visited. It was usually my reminder to take a break and go to the bathroom and buy something from a vending machine before returning.
I studied this list. Hmmm….. Darrell Low…. A person with impeccable character. Would love to play a good joke when given the change, but honest as the day is long. Jim Kanelakos…. Devious at times, but personally a very good friend. A person so dear to me that I him kept personally in my daily prayers. Charles Peavler… well… by the title of this post…. you already know the rest of the story.
I eliminated Darrell immediately since I knew his character and I would trust him with my life (which I actually would at times when he would place clearances for me). I suspected Peavler right off, but I thought I would make sure that Jim Kanelakos wasn't just playing a joke on me first. So, I approached him and asked him if he had taken a pair of jumpers from a tool bucket in the Precipitator control room over the weekend.
At first Jim looked at me with a hurt feeling that I thought might be a perfect expression if he was playing a joke on me. He was holding the look of sorrow and hurt that I would actually accuse him vaguely of stealing a pair of jumpers from a tool bucket. When I pressed him on the issue. The hurt look changed to a look of resolve and he said directly, "No. I didn't take them."
I knew immediately that he was telling me the truth. Jim and I had worked together with Charles Peavler on the labor crew together. We actually used to analyse his behavior as sort of a joke, and kind of a refresher of our Psychology background. Jim Kanelakos had earned a Masters Of Arts in Psychology, while I had a bachelors in the same field. So, we used to have fun joking around together about the unusual behavior of Peavler.
Charles Peavler looked like the Sergeant on Gomer Pyle. Except that he had chewed tobacco so long that his lower lip was permanently curled so that he looked like Popeye. I say that because they had the same lower jaw and the same amount of hair on his head:
Once I was certain that Charles Peavler had taken the Jumpers from Bob's (or Donald's – I'm relying on one of you telling me which one) tool bucket, I approached him with the attitude that I already knew it was him. I came up to him in the Control room and said, "Charles! You know that pair of jumpers that you took from that tool bucket over the weekend? I need those back!"
I explained to him that I had told the visiting electrician that it was safe to leave his tools there because no one would touch his stuff. So, I felt personally responsible to get the jumpers back. Charles immediately denied that he had taken the jumpers. He said that he didn't know what I was talking about. I told him that I had checked, and he was the only person over the weekend that would have taken them. So, I needed them back. He continued to deny that he had taken them.
As the overhaul was lasting a few weeks longer, I continually approached Charles in the middle of the control room where the Control Room operators were within earshot asking him to give the jumpers back to me. I would tell him how I need them so that we could continue our work. Also I would explain each time that the reputation of our Power Plant was at stake.
Finally one day he said, "Well. I don't have them here. I took them home." — That was a great relief to me. I had been continually accusing him day after day of taking those jumpers. I was finally glad to find out I hadn't been accusing someone falsely, which was always a vague thought in the back of my mind. The moment he told me he had taken the jumpers home, I jumped on him (not literally – though the thought occurred to me). I said, "I need those jumpers back!"
It took about a week. Each day whether he was on the day shift or the night shift or the evening shift, since we were on overhaul working a lot of overtime, he was not able to escape me. I would go up to him and ask him, "Did you bring those jumpers today? " Each time in the middle of the control room, quite loudly.
Finally, about a week after he admitted having the jumpers when I asked him about it in the middle of the control room, he went into the locker room and soon returned with the pair of jumpers and handed them to me. I quickly returned them to Bob (or Donald), and apologized profusely for the inconvenience. I didn't tell him exactly what had happened to the jumpers, only that I had finally tracked them down.
I guess, he didn't know that I knew him so well. So well in fact that to this day, I have kept Charles Peavler also in my prayers every day. When he lost his mother in on April 1, 2000 (fourteen years this week), I felt his loss also. He left the plant on July 29, 1994 during the last (and the worst) downsizing the Power Plant ever experienced. To this day, though I was peeved with Peavler back then, I still care for him deeply. I don't think he was a "True Power Plant Man", but neither was Jim Kanelakos or myself.
Some day Charles will meet our maker. When he does, he will be able to say, "Yeah. I did steal a pair of jumpers once. But I ended up by giving them back." I clearly remember the look of relief that day when Charles placed those jumpers in my hand. It was if a heavy burden had been lifted. Actually, by that time I had decided that it was as important for Charles to give back those jumpers as it was for Bob (or Donald) to get them back. Something had compelled him to lift that pair of jumpers, I think it was an opportunity for him to face reality. I thought that he was having a "Come to Jesus" moment when he confessed.
I often wondered what Charles' mother Opal Peavler would have thought of Charles. I suppose she finally found out. I suspect that by the time she found out, that Charles had mended his ways. After all, he was on his way when we had danced this dance in the middle of the control room that week in 1992. He did finally admit that he had stolen something. I'm sure he thought at the time that an electrician could easily make a new pair of first class jumpers. We wouldn't care that someone had come along and taken one measly pair of jumpers.
Actually, if Charles had ever come to the electric shop and asked any electrician for a pair of jumpers, any one of the electricians would have been glad to whip up a pair as if by magic. I think it was just that one moment when he was alone with a tool bucket staring at him and a perfectly prepared pair of jumpers were gleaming up at him that in a moment of weakness, he decided he could pilfer this pair without anyone knowing.
To tell you the truth. I was very proud of Charles Peavler the day he placed those jumpers in my hand. Geez. I didn't realize until after I finished this post that I have a picture of Peavler:
Power Plant "We've Got The Power" Stress Buster
Originally posted April 12, 2014:
In an earlier post titled "Power Plant We've Got the Power Program" I explained how in 1990 we broke up into teams at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma to find ways to save the Electric Company money. Before we were actually able to turn in our first set of ideas, we had a month or more to prepare those ideas and to turn them into proposals. During this time, and throughout the entire "We've Got the Power" program, teams who wanted to succeed and outdo the other teams became very secretive. Our team was definitely that way. We had secret experiments going on throughout the plant, and we didn't want other teams to even know what areas we were investigating.
As the program progressed, a certain level of stress developed between teams. In a later post I will tell a story about how this level of stress led to a situation of suspicion and eventually even animosity. This post will not go into that situation. Instead I want to explain what our team did to try to alleviate some of the stress by devising a special "Power Plant Joke" that we played on the rest of the Power Plant Men (and Women).
There were some teams that had setup some experiments that they were running to see if their ideas may save the company money. Our team had several experiments running throughout the beginning months. All of which we carefully hid from prying eyes. We were proud of our stealthiness. Sneaking around, making sure we weren't being followed when we went to take readings from our carefully hidden recorders and other devices.
Charles Foster, Scott Hubbard and I were sitting in the electric shop office discussing the stress level that had permeated the plant, and we thought we could take advantage of the stress by setting up a "We've Got The Power" Experiment out in the open that would be obvious to anyone that walked by. Only it would be a fake experiment designed to play a joke on the unsuspecting Power Plant Man.
Here is what we did….
Right outside the electric shop in the Turbine Generator basement there is a water fountain. We placed a hazard waste barrel a few feet away from the water fountain. Like this:
Then we mounted a junction box on the wall a few feet above the chemical waste barrel and a little to the right.
We turned the junction box so that the hinge was on the top, allowing the door to fall closed naturally. This was an important part of the setup to allow for the joke to automatically reset each time it was operated.
We ran some copper tubing from the water fountain water line over to the box. Then another copper line came out the bottom of the box and into the barrel. Next to that copper tube, another smaller copper tube came out of the bottom of the box and just bent toward the front of the box. It was not noticeable. We had a plastic hose coming out of the barrel and over to the drain next to the water fountain. Then we put Yellow Barrier Tape around the entire setup.
We tied Caution tags to the Barrier tape that said "We've Got the Power Experiment" Do not enter! I signed the tags.
There was an electric conduit running up from the junction box, that went up and into the wall about 6 feet above the junction box. So, this looked like a legitimate experiment going on, but for the life of anyone, no one would be able to tell what it was doing. — Mainly because it wasn't doing anything….. At least not until someone went to investigate it.
So. Here is what would happen….
Employees would walk by and see the barrier tape with the hazardous waste barrel and the hoses and water lines coming from the back of the water fountain, with a junction box above it that was not completely closed. The door to the junction box was down, but not screwed closed. Conduit was going into the box, which meant that something electrical was probably inside Maybe a solenoid or something that was controlling the experiment.
They would read the Caution Tag that explained that this was a "We've Got the Power" experiment, and it would pique (pronounced "peak") their curiosity enough that they couldn't help but investigate it to see what was really going on.
So, what would invariably happen, was that someone would enter the area that was barrier taped off, and open the junction box to see what was inside. When they lifted the lid, they would find that they were instantly being soaked with water that would spray out of a small copper line pointing right at them directly under the junction box. At the same time, an alarm would go off above them behind the wall right above the electric shop office. It was very loud. A counter inside the junction box would register an "intruder' had just opened the box.
So, as we would be sitting there during lunch, we would suddenly hear the alarm go off, and we could dart out the door to the Turbine Generator basement to find a drenched Power Plant Man. They were usually amused that they had fallen into the trap. I say usually, because I have the feeling that one particular person who found himself violating the barrier tape and getting soaked didn't act too cordial about it. I'll get to him later.
As I said, inside the box was a counter. It counted how many times the box had been opened and sprayed someone with water. So, we could go inspect it in the morning and we would know if anyone had looked at it while we were gone.
After the experiment had been there about a week, an overhaul began where Power Plant Men from different plants came to our plant to perform the overhaul. The plant would shut off one of the units and we would take it apart, and put it back together again fixing problems along the way (well. maybe not quite that drastic. It was a time to fix things that couldn't be maintained or repaired while the unit was running).
So, the Power Plant Men at our plant, who by that time all knew about the bogus experiment just outside the electric shop, would bring unsuspecting Power Plant Men from other plants over to the see the "We've Got the Power" experiment going on in the hopes of seeing them get sprayed with water. So, a new round of alarms were going off during that time.
Eventually, when people had heard about the experiment, and knew that it was spraying people, they would approach the experiment with caution. When they opened the lid of the junction box, they would stand next to it against the wall in order to not get wet. The spray pattern from the crimped copper line was fairly wide, so you would have to stand practically against the wall next to the box in order to stay dry.
So, this was when we implemented Phase 2 of the experiment. — Yeah. It's the second phase of many Power Plant Jokes that usually make the joke a much bigger success than the first phase. For instance, I have written a post about the "Psychological Profile of a Control Room Operator" in which I had played a joke on Gene Day, where after a week of preparing him for the final joke, I had coaxed him to look over my shoulder, only to have him read that according to his psychological profile, he was the type of person that would look over your shoulder and read your private material.
That would be a good joke in itself, but when Gene Day read that and began choking the life out of me, I pointed out to him the final statement in Gene Day's profile which stated that he tends to choke people who try to help him by creating Psychological profiles of him. This second part of the joke is what really completes the joke and makes it a real success. The first part just makes it funny.
So, here is how we modified the experiment for Phase 2…. The nozzle that sprayed the employee actually came out the bottom of the box and elbowed to point toward the front of the box. So, what we did was we took a file and filed a tiny notch in the side of the copper tubing just below the junction box just above the elbow. The notch was on the side of the copper tube, and it was deep enough of a notch to make a little hole in the side of the copper line.
So, then, if someone was standing to the only side they could stand next to the box and the barrel and they opened up the lid of the Junction Box to show someone how the experiment worked, they wouldn't notice right away, but a small stream of water would be spraying on their pants in just the appropriate location to make it look like the person had just pee'ed their pants.
Right when we had finished modifying the experiment for Phase 2, Howard Chumbley walked into the electric shop. He was a retired Electric Foreman, that I have written about in the post "Pioneers of Power Plant Fame Finally Find Peace". He had come to visit the plant that day because there was going to be a Men's Club lunch and he wanted to come and see some other old codgers that he used to work with that liked to attend the Men's Club dinners. He always wanted to see us of course as well.
So, we told him about the "We've Got The Power" Joke Experiment just outside the electric shop that sprayed water on people. Of course, he wanted to see it, so we took him out and let him observe it. We explained that when you open the lid, an alarm goes off, the counter toggles and water sprays out of that little nozzle sticking out at the bottom. We told him he could try it if he wanted to see how it worked.
So, he climbed under the barrier tape and walked around the side of the junction box that didn't have the barrel, and reached over and lifted the lid. The alarm when off, water sprayed out, and Howard laughed with glee to see how we had devised such a nice trick. After watching the water spray for about 3 or 4 seconds, he suddenly realized that something was wrong. He dropped the lid and looked down, only to find that it looked like he had just pee'ed his pants.
That was it! That was icing on the cake. Howard laughed even more when he realized what had happened.
The next morning when we came in the shop, we went to look at the experiment, it had been disassembled, or shutdown in some manner. I think some caution tag had been placed there by Gary Wright, the Shift Supervisor stating something like this was a safety hazard, or some such thing.
Anyway, when I went up to the Control Room to ask him why he shutdown our experiment he was adamant that it constituted Horseplay and someone could get hurt. Maybe when the water sprayed on them, they might jerk back and fall down and get hurt. Ok….
I suppose. Though, by the time he took it down, everyone at the plant already knew about it, and we were just in the Phase 2 part of the experiment. In this phase anyone who was looking at the experiment was doing it by opening up the door from the side, and peeing their pants and they wouldn't jerk back……—- Oh….. I see…. Shift Supervisors don't usually like to walk into the control room looking like they have just pee'ed their pants.
I will say that I hadn't expected that type of reaction from Gary Wright, because up to that time, he seemed more mild-mannered than the rest of the Shift Supervisors. We just took it that the more upset Gary was with us about it, the more successful the joke had been implemented. The joke had played out by that time, and we were good with it either way.
After it was all said and done. We thought it did help to reduce the overall tension that was permeating the plant due to the "We've Got the Power Program".
Early Morning Power Plant Wake Up Call
Originally posted May 30, 2014:
Unlike the story I told a few weeks ago about Jim Padgett, this is not a story about being called to work in the middle of the night by a true Power Plant Man (See post: "Making A Friends from Foes – A Tale of Power Plant Woes") or even like the story that explained the "Power Plant Black Time and the Six Hour Rule". No. This is a quick story about a sobering slap in the face I encountered when walking into the electric shop one morning at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
I think this must have been when I was on someone's short list for a "Power Plant Joke", or maybe I just hadn't been paying attention a month earlier when Bill Bennett may have informed me that this morning was coming. Either way, I was totally taken off guard when I entered the shop that morning with Scott Hubbard, my Carpooling buddy.
The first indication that something was up was that there were three contract hands standing there dressed in their worn clothing indicating that they had been hired to do some kind of "manual" activity. Yep. Worn jeans with holes. Shirts slightly ripped. One guy missing the sleeves on his shirt. I think one of them had accidentally taken a shower before he showed up. He may have mixed up his Mondays and Saturdays and woke up grumpy on Saturday and took a shower on Monday.
None of the contract hands had thought about shaving for the past week or so. So, they definitely looked out of place in the shop usually occupied by professional Power Plant Electricians, who liked to keep themselves clean and generally followed good hygiene practices.
My first thought was, "Hmm…. Looks like there is some dirty job someone has to do in the shop today. I wonder what it is." I walked into the electric shop to wait until 8:00 to come around. Bill Bennett was leaning against one of the desks talking to Charles Foster. I asked Bill, "What's up with the Contractors?"
Bill replied, "They are here to help you." "What am I going to be doing?" I asked curiously. "You know. Pulling wire from the Vital Service Panel to the Telephone Room in the main office." "Oh. That." I replied trying to remember if I could recall ever being told that I was supposed to be inheriting this particular job.
The last time I had felt like this was when I was in High School and our American History teacher told us that the semester class projects were due tomorrow and he continued to explain that we would be presenting the projects in alphabetical order. "Which means that Kevin Breazile. You will be going first."
Side Story Time:
Class Project? Oh No! I had forgotten all about it! I was supposed to write a paper about the Roadway system in the United States, including how we were preparing to go to the Metric System." (Like that ever happened… This was in 1976).
So, after school I went straight home and told my mom that I needed to go to the Public Library to prepare for a class project that needed to be done tomorrow. At the library I quickly grabbed a bunch of facts out of encyclopedias. I made up a few statistics about how many miles of roads there were in the United States.
Then once I was back at home, I thought about the roads in the U.S. Well, there were dirt roads, gravel roads, asphalt roads, and roads made of concrete. So. I filled a jar with dirt. One with some rocks I found out in the street. I found a piece of asphalt that had worked itself loose at the intersection by my house. I also found a chunk of concrete under our deck in the backyard where we had busted up our patio once to pour a new one…. These were my props for my presentation.
I remembered that on the way from Kansas City To Columbia Missouri along Highway 70, there was a sign that said, 100 Miles or 160 Kilometers to Columbia. There was also one just outside Saint Louis going to Columbia that said the same thing. So, I added that to my presentation. This met the requirement of how the roadways were moving to the metric system.
When the presentation began, I began handing the jars to someone in the front row to pass around the class….. Yeah. A jar of dirt. A jar of rocks, and a piece of asphalt and the chunk of concrete. I remember our teacher, Mr. Wright grabbed the chunk of Concrete when I gave it to the guy in the front row and looking it over, then pointing to a spot on it and saying, "I can see the skid marks here where I almost hit you!"
Anyway. I ended the presentation by taking the chunk of concrete after it had been passed around the class and holding it up and saying that if we continued to create roads at the same pace that we have over the last 60 years, by the year 2076 the world will look like this…. And I held up the chunk of concrete. — Of course.. I had totally made that statistic up out of thin air. — I got an A+ for that project which was worth 1/3 of our grade for the semester.
End of side story.
So, here I was again, fourteen years later, and I was being told that I had a crew of guys standing out in the shop waiting for directions on how to pull cable from the Logic room just below the control room, across the T-G building and into the middle of the Office building on the top floor. Even though the Office was on the 3rd floor, it was equivalent to the 6th floor of an office building.
From experience, I knew that the cable would have to be pulled from the logic room down to the cable spreading room below the main Switchgear, through two manholes, then up through conduit to the office area above the break room kitchen and over to the Telephone room.
I had done nothing to prepare for this. I hadn't looked through the blueprints to find the best route. I hadn't even seen the large spool of wire on the pallet in the Main Switchgear waiting to be used. I hadn't even prepared myself by looking confident like I knew what I was doing….
Bill walked out the door leaving me in the office with Charles. I wasn't sure if Charles could tell that I was completely blind-sided by this job or not. But he did give me a quick "leg up". He said, "Seems to me that there is already power going from the VSP (for Vital Services Panel) to the Telephone room."
Well. I already knew that I was really lucky. Especially when I asked Saint Anthony to help me find a solution to a problem. So, I quickly glanced over in the corner where Saint Anthony liked to lean against the wall while he waited for me to come to my senses and have some faith. In my mind I could see Anthony shrug like, "sounds like you might give it a try."
So, I walked… no… I strolled out into the shop like I belonged there….. — Oh… yeah. I did. But at that particular moment I didn't feel like it, so I thought maybe if I walked like I felt like I did, it would help me feel that way.
I asked Scott Hubbard if he could help me check to see if we had power in the Telephone Room from the Vital Services Panel. He said he would be glad to help (this was Scott's usual response. — A True Power Plant Man Response).
I asked him to go the Telephone room while I went to the Vital Service Panel for Unit 1 in the Logic Room. Scott took his handy Dandy Voltage Checking Tool and headed off toward the Office area.
I headed for the Logic Room with a pair of Fuse Pullers:
The Vital Service Panel is mounted on the wall next to the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). I opened it and read the labels inside of the cover. After scanning the list of locations that were fed from this panel I found one that could have been the one circuit I was looking for.
It was cryptically labelled in pencil "Telephone Room". Hmmm…. I wonder if this is it… My mind had quick as a snap decrypted this entry and came up with "Telephone room". — That sure sounds like this would provide power to the Telephone room. Let's just hope that it is labelled correctly.
I waited until Scott called me on the gray phone to tell me that he was in place by the Telephone room. He had checked all of the receptacles (plug ins) in the room, and they all had power on them.
I told him that I would remove the fuse to the circuit that looked like it provided power to the telephone room, so in about 15 seconds, he could check to see if any of the receptacles was dead. So, we did just that. I removed the fuse….. — My first thought was…. Good. I didn't trip the unit. I would have known that right away. — You never know… pulling a fuse out of a panel labelled "Vital Services Panel" kind of leaves you to believe that the stuff in this panel is really really important.
I went back to the gray phone and waited for Scott to get back on the phone. About 15 more seconds and Scott returned. He told me that the power had turned off on one of the receptacles on the wall. I told him I was going to put the fuse back in and head up to the telephone room so that he could show me where it was.
Literally 20 minutes after I had been jolted awake by the revelation that I was supposed to lead a crew of contractors on a wire pull that I had not prepared for, I had found out that the wire was already there. No wire pull was necessary.
Scott showed me where the receptacle was, and we walked back to the electric shop. Bill Bennett was standing in the shop wondering where I had disappeared to (oops. ended the sentence with a preposition. I should know better than that. I should have said, "….where I went."). I was still wondering in the back of my head if I had just completely forgot that Bill had ever told me about this, or maybe he had forgotten to mention it in the first place, or he had not told me on purpose just to see how I would react to the sudden revelation that I had a semi-difficult job with no time to prepare for it.
I waited for Bill to follow me into the electric shop office. Which he did. Standing there with as straight of a face as I could muster, I looked at Bill as he asked me when I was going to start pulling the wire. The Contractors are just standing around doing nothing.
I said, "The job is already done. The wire has already been pulled." "What do you mean? It's still in the switchgear on the pallet." Bill responded. I shrugged and said, "We don't need to pull wire from the Vital Services Panel. There is already a circuit from that panel to the telephone room." I looked over at Charles and smiled. Charles smiled back. Bill said something like, "Oh… Then I wonder what we are going to do with these contractors. We have them for three days." Then he left the office.
I thought that somehow Charles knew something about my being "setup for some kind of failure" and had this up his sleeve all along so that it would backfire. — Just my luck. With three of my best friends standing there, how could I fail…. Charles Foster, Scott Hubbard and Saint Anthony.
We had the contractors sweep out switchgears for the next 3 days.
Comment from the original Post
Power Plant Customer Service Team Gone Wild
Originally posted July 4, 2014. Added some pictures:
I never would have guessed that playing Power Plant Man jokes on Gene Day would have led me to the "Uh Oh!" moment I later encountered when I was told in no uncertain terms that the President of the Electric Company, James G. Harlow Junior was personally upset with something I had done. I had learned my first year as a summer help at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma that "One 'Uh Oh' wipes out all previous 'Atta Boys'!" I could tell by the way the Electric Supervisor, Tom Gibson's ears were glowing red that this was considered a little more serious than I had first realized.
I have mentioned in previous posts that playing jokes on Gene Day was one of my favorite Power Plant Man Pastimes. See the post, "Power Plant Humor and Joking With Gene Day". Also see, "Psychological Profile of a Power Plant Control Room Operator". My lunch breaks were usually consumed with learning more about how to program the Honeywell mainframe computer used by just about all the company processes that actually ran the company from payroll, to billing, to work orders and Inventory. I figured that as I learned more about the computer system, the more elaborate jokes I would be able to play on Gene.
Already I had learned about the escape codes used by the large IBM printers that were used throughout the company at the time. This allowed me to create graphic images on the printer as well as large bold letters.
Besides the telephone and inter-company mail, printers were the only other way to communicate to non-present Power Plant Men in 1989. We had not yet been introduced to e-mail. I was one of the few people in the company that had an e-mail address on the mainframe, and the only other person that I knew that I could write to was Craig Henry, a Corporate Engineer downtown.
Much like the first time when I met Gene Day, when I first encountered Craig Henry, I could tell right away that he was a down-to-earth person that would shoot straight. Craig probably wouldn't remember this far into the past that I would reach out to him occasionally just to say "Hi" and to pick his brain about how the corporate IT infrastructure was setup. I figured since he was one of the few people in the company that even knew what an e-mail address was at the time, he most likely had more knowledge about such things than the average person in Corporate Headquarters.
After finding out that Gene Day would go work out at the Rock Gym in Stillwater, Oklahoma after work, and I had played the joke on him with the notes from the private investigator, I used my knowledge of Printer Escape codes to write documents on the mainframe that when printed out would turn on the graphic commands on the printer so that I could print out pictures. I don't mean that I would have a saved picture that I would send to a printer like we might do today. No. I had to create these pictures one pixel at a time using commands in a UNIX document on the mainframe. It was all codes that would not make sense to anyone that didn't know the graphic commands of the IBM printers.
I had been teasing Gene Day about meeting up with a young "coed" from the University at the Gym each day. I would do this by printing out messages on the Control Room printer by the the Shift Supervisor's office when I knew that Gene Day was there filling in as the Shift Supervisor. They were usually notes from someone that called herself "Bunny". Usually they were short notes or "love letters" from Bunny just saying something about how she enjoyed her time with Gene at the Gym.
At the bottom I would sign it "Bunny" then under it, the printer would read the graphic commands and create a small Playboy Bunny symbol under the name. At the end, the document would send a command that would put the printer back into the text mode.
Of course. Whenever I walked into the control room shortly after, just to see how the precipitator was doing, Gene Day would confront me about the notes. With a grin on his face he would say, "This isn't funny! What if my wife found one of these notes?" — Like that was ever going to happen…. unless he was like me, and likes to save everything.
In order to create the bunny at the bottom I had to create the pixels in small blocks of 9 pixel patterns. Here is the code I used to create the bunny:
In the last couple of weeks I have written about how the Power Plant Men were introduced to the "Quality Process" (otherwise known as "Six Sigma"). We had created teams with our crews and we met once each week to come up with Quality ideas. By August, 1993, I had received my official Certificate Certifying that I had completed all the QuickStart training and was on my way to making a difference in the Power Plant World!
So, what do these two events have in common and how did this lead the President of the Electric Company to send out a search warrant on a lowly (lowlife is more like it) Plant Electrician in North Central Oklahoma? Well. This is what happened…
First you have to remember that in 1993, the Internet was not easily accessible by the general public. Company e-mail was still not a reality in our company. We had dumb terminals and large IBM printers. That was the extent of most employees interaction with a computer. Each printer had a designation. It was a five character ID beginning with a "P". So, the printer in the Electric Shop Office might be…. P1234. I needed to know this number if I wanted to send something to it.
At the time, the only thing people had to send to each other were requests for things from the mainframe systems that were used to run the company. So, for instance, if you wanted to request some parts from the warehouse at our plant, we would send over a list of parts to the warehouse printer where Dick Dale and Darlene Mitchell would pick it up and go retrieve the parts. So, the people that used the terminals and computers with mainframe emulators on them knew the most commonly used printer numbers in the plant.
If you wanted to send something to someone in Oklahoma City, or to the Power Plant in Muskogee, then you would have to call over there and ask the person what their Printer ID is so you can be sure you are sending your request to the appropriate printer. Without e-mail, and any other form of computerized communication. This was the only way at the time.
So, after our Customer Service Team was formed, we would meet once each week to brainstorm new ideas that would benefit the company. Andy Tubbs was our team leader, as he was our foreman.
The other members of our Customer Service Team were Diana Brien, Scott Hubbard, Sonny Kendrick, Ben Davis and Gary Wehunt. I haven't properly introduced my bucket buddy Diana Brien in a post before. I have recently obtained a photograph that I can share:
We were called bucket buddies because we carried tool buckets with us whenever we went to work on something. They doubled as our stool and tripled as our trash can.
Thursday, July 15, 1993 during our Quality Brainstorming session, while we were pouring out ideas like…. "What if we changed out the street lights at the plant so that they would be different colors…. wouldn't that help morale?…. and "How about if we wrapped fluorescent Christmas lights around the high voltage electric lines between here and Oklahoma City so that they could light up the night with colorful lights during the Christmas Season?"….. And other ingenious Brainstorming ideas that are bound to pull up an occasional brilliant idea….. well. One such idea popped up!
I don't remember which one of our brilliant brainstorming ideas conjured up this idea, but Andy Tubbs suddenly blurted out…. "What if we had the Printer IDs added as a column in the Corporate Directory? — You see, each quarter we received an updated copy of the Corporate Phone Book. It included the names and office phone numbers of all the Electric Company employees. It also included their mail code. So, if you wanted to send something through inter-company mail to them, you would know where to send it. Our mail code was PP75. That was the code for our power plant.
So, what if we added a column where we had the printer ID that each person would use for people to send printed requests, among other things? This was Brilliant! We could just make this proposal and send it downtown to Corporate Headquarters where it would be lost in the "mail". Or we could do more research to prove that it was a possible proposal that was really do-able.
So, I suggested…. Well… I can print a form out on every printer in the entire company requesting that they include all the names of all the people that use that printer and mail it through inter-company mail back to me at PP75. — I had recently uncovered a special printer command that allowed me to do this hidden away on the Honeywell mainframe. So, we took a vote and it was decided that we would pursue this proposal. I set to work on creating the form that I would send to every printer. If we could not only send the proposal to the Communications department downtown, but also a list of everyone and their printers, the work would already have been done for them.
I wanted to send a real fancy letter because I had already created a header using the Quality print settings on the printers. I had created a Company Logo that (I thought) ingeniously used the backspace command to create two words with one word on top of the other in the middle of a sentence…. Our company began as Oklahoma Gas and….. in the logo, I wanted the word Gas to be on top of the word And as it was in our company logo in smaller letters than the others. So… after playing around with it for a while, I created the logo and had it saved on the mainframe.
After attaching the header to the form, I included a message that told the person that discovered the form on the printer to add the names of all people who used the printer below and to send the form to Kevin Breazile at PP75. As I mentioned. In order to make the form look pretty, I turned on the Quality Print settings on the printer at the beginning of the document. Like the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice….. I didn't know a good way to turn off all the settings I changed to revert the printers back to their original settings.
I ran the command to send the document to every printer on the print server and away they went…. A copy printed out on the printer in the Electric Shop office so I knew it was working. Copies printed out on the other 12 printers at our plant. They also printed out on the 500 other printers throughout Oklahoma. — With the thought that "My work here is done." I went back to work repairing plant electric equipment.
The following Monday I had the day off. When I returned to work on Tuesday, Denise Anson called me from the front office. She said that I had a large stack of mail. I thought, "Oh good!" Results from our request on Thursday have arrived! I hurried up to the front office.
When I entered the mail cubicle I was surprised to see how big the pile of envelopes were. The stack of inter-company envelopes was over two feet high. "Um…. Thanks…." I said to Denise. I picked up the stack and headed back to the Electric Shop to sort out the forms.
After opening the first few envelopes. I suddenly came to an astonishing discovery. Not only did the form print out on the large mainframe IBM printers used in office areas, it also had printed out on other types of printers…. I opened one envelope and found the form printed out on a "Work Order" printer. The paper size was different than the standard paper size, and I hadn't put a page feed at the end of the document, so, it had left the paper in the middle of the page…. "Uh Oh".
My "Uh Oh" changed to "UH OH!" after opening a few more of the inter-company envelopes. I found that the form had printed out on Pay Check Printers! And Billing Printers! "UH OH!" quickly changed to "OH NO!" When I read comments like "Under no circumstances print anything on this Printer Again!!!!" I realized I had really messed things up. By changing the font size and the quality settings, the billing, payroll and work order printers all had to be manually reset and the jobs that printed out paychecks, customer bills and employee work orders had to be re-run!
After taking all the forms out of their envelopes, the stack of papers was over 4 inches thick, just to give you an idea about how many responses we had.
A couple of hours later, Tom Gibson called me to his office. "Uh Oh." (remember… One "uh oh" erases all previous "atta boy"s). When I entered Tom's office, I could tell that something was definitely wrong. Like I mentioned earlier. Tom's ears were beet red…. and in case you don't know what a beet looks like. Here is one:
Of course… I knew what this was all about, only I didn't know yet, how Tom had found out about it…. Tom began by saying…. "Ron Kilman just received a call from James Harlow asking him who is Kevin Breazile and why is he printing something out on my printer? Ron didn't like the fact that he wasn't aware that you had sent something to the President of the Company's printer.
Sorry. That's the biggest picture I could find of James Harlow….
Um what could I say? So, I said this…
"Well. This was a quality idea that our team had. We wanted to collect the names of people that used each printer so that we could send in a proposal to have the printer ID added in the Corporate Directory."
I didn't mention that Harlow's Secretary had returned the form with all the people that used his computer as I had requested, because I knew that the President of the Electric Company was not asking because he was upset that I had printed something out on his printer. No. He had probably been told that the reason the bills were late being sent to the one million customers that month was because some kook had messed up their printers and the jobs had to be run over again causing the delay. So, I thought it was best not to go down that route at this time…
So, I stuck with my story, which was the truth…. I had printed out the forms on all the printers as part of a quality idea by our CST. — I also didn't mention that three years earlier, Tom had asked me to learn everything I could about the company computer, because he believe that the computer was going to be the wave of the future.
Even though Tom believed my explanation, he told me…. "Kevin, Ron never wants this to happen again, therefore, you are never to send anything out of this plant without Ron Kilman's personal approval. Is that clear?"
I replied to Tom that this was unreasonable. I send things to other departments all the time. I send Substation Inspection forms, and blueprint revisions and all sorts of other forms downtown all the time. Ron Kilman wouldn't want to waste his time approving all those things….
Tom thought about it and revised his statement…. "Then, don't ever send out anything that isn't part of your normal daily job without Ron's approval first." — Ok. I thought…. this works, since everything I do is part of my normal daily job…. Even printing out forms on all the printers in the company… since that was part of our normal "Quality Process" Customer Service Team activity…. So, I happily agreed. And I left Tom's office happy that I hadn't joined the ranks of the unemployed.
That was one thing about working at the plant at this time. As long as your heart was in the right place…. That is, you tried your best to keep the electricity humming through the electric lines…. then the chances of being fired for messing up, even as big of a mess up as this, most often didn't end up by losing your job.
I sometimes think that this was my biggest mess up of all time… however…. after this episode was over… there was a part two to this story….. Believe it or not…. Someone else in the company was overjoyed about what I had just done. They had been trying to do something similar for a long time, only to be told that it was impossible. — Doing the Impossible… I was good at that… Part two of this story is a story for another day…
Since this is a repost of this story, I have written part two, which you can read here: "Printing Impossible Power Plant Fast News Post".