Power Plant Law of the Hog

Power Plant Men learned about the “Law of the Hog” the first day they were introduced to the new “Quality Process”.  I recently wrote a post about how the Power Plant Men at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma were trained to use various tools to help them formulate ideas quality improvement ideas at the plant in June, 1993.  See the post “A Chance for Power Plant Men to Show Their Quality“.  Even though we were hearing about the “Law of the Hog” for the first time, I recognized it right away.  I had seen it in action the previous November 3, 1992.

What better way to convince a room full of skeptical Power Plant Men that the Quality Process is about improving the conditions at the plant than by first telling them what they already know in such a way that from then on they believe you really do know what you’re talking about.  — I know.  That was a confusing sentence, so let me explain.  The instructor told us the story about “The Law of the Hog”.

This evidently was a story that had been going around since the late 70’s.  It had to do with a saw mill in Oregon.  This is the story the instructor told  us…

A group of quality consultants, or…  I think they called themselves Leadership consultants back then were visiting the saw mill because they evidently needed some help.  While the consultants were learning about how the plant operated, they  talked with the workers one-on-one and asked them how things were really done at the mill.  That’s when the workers told the consultant about “The Hog”.

The Hog is a grinder that takes scrap wood and grinds it up into sawdust.  The consultants had asked them how they worked with supervisors when they were “lacking” in leadership skills.  (I would say “evidently” again here, but I’ve already used that word three times.  And the last time was just now while explaining that I would like to use that word again, but… — I’ll have to think of another word…. let’s see… oh.  I know…. Apparently…).  Anyway, apparently, that was when they told the consultants about The Hog that lived in the shack off to one side of the main mill.

So, what happens is that when their supervisor uses a heavy hand to try to whip the workers into shape, the Hog is used for more than just chewing up scraps.  When the workers were treated with disrespect, then “The Law of the Hog” went into effect.  What happened then was that the workers would throw perfectly good pieces of wood into the Hog where it would be turned to dust (saw dust that is).  Since the supervisors were measured on their productivity which took a beating when good wood would be destroyed (Yeah.  I couldn’t help using the words Wood and Would together… And then using “Words”, “Wood” and “Would” all together while explaining my obsession).  So, the workers would pay the supervisor back each time he displayed inferior leadership skills.

A byproduct of bad leadership

Oh yeah.  The Power Plant Men knew all about that.  The guys at Muskogee, however, didn’t use such indirect methods.  They had one Assistant Plant Manager (I won’t tell you his name but I think his initials were  Morehouse.  well.  Something House anyway), that treated his men with a little more than disrespect, and was surprised one night when the front door to his house was blown off the hinges.  He was quickly reassigned to Oklahoma City.  But then I have always said that something is in the water in Muskogee.  See the post “Something is in the Water at the Muskogee Power Plant“.

When the Quality instructor was telling us the story about the “Law of the Hog” a few examples immediately entered my head.  Well, one was the Six Hour Rule.  I mentioned this in an earlier post where there was a complicated rule about how an employee could collect “black time” and double time when they were called out at night.  As management tried to manipulate the rule to the detriment of the employee, the opposite effect actually happened.  After trying to skimp on paying the double time the employee was accustomed to, that was the time when I made the most money from that rule.  See the post “Power Plant Black Time and Six Hour Rules“.

This leads us to a dark and stormy day at the Power Plant…. November 3, 1992.  The story actually begins the day before.  Unit 2 had been offline for a “more than” minor overhaul (I believe it was a six week overhaul instead of the usual 4 weeks).  I was the acting foreman for the crew that was working on the precipitator.  Terry Blevins normally was in charge of the Unit 2 Precipitator, but for this overhaul, Scott Hubbard and I were assigned to make all the necessary precipitator repairs.  The main reason was that new rapper controls were being installed, and Scott had a lot of experience doing this since he had installed them on Unit 1 already.

Scott Hubbard

At that time, Scott and I were like twin brothers.  Whatever he was doing… I had to be there to help.  Scott would work on the roof of the precipitator generally, while I worked inside.  We had been given some operators to help us along with a few contract workers to do the “grunt” work.  That is, when you would ask them to do something, they would usually reply with a low moaning grunty sort of sound (I just made up that word…. grunty.  It seemed to fit).

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway just in case any “Non-Precipitator Gurus” are reading this)…. in order to install the new digital rapper controls, a lot of wire had to be pulled and laid down on terminal blocks from some rapper cabinets to other cabinets across the precipitator.  When I say a lot, I mean somewhere over 10 miles of wire.  15 feet at at time.  — I was sure glad Scott was doing that while I was strolling away inside the precipitator quietly looking for plates out of alignment and broken wires dressed in my space suit.  For a better understanding of what a precipitator does, see the post “Moon Walk in A Power Plant Precipitator“.

I was not inside the precipitator on November 3, 1992, however, I had already finished up inside the precipitator by that time and I was working on the roof in cabinet 2G1 (on the southeast corner) on that day.  We had the radio on and I was sitting on my bucket listening to Rush Limbaugh throwing a fit (as he has been known to do from time-to-time).  None of our help was doing any work that day.  The “Law of the Hog” had come into play and a day of rest had been declared by the helpers.

I was working away laying down the wires on the terminal blocks inside the rapper cabinet while the rest of the crew (minus Scott Hubbard who was on the far side of the precipitator roof working in another cabinet) was sitting around dangling their feet from the walkway near my cabinet.  Merl Wright and Jim Kanelakos (two operators) were there along with three contract help.  During that day I spent a lot of time running back and forth between the office area and the precipitator roof.

Here is what happened:

On November 2, 1992, just before every one left for the day, the word came down that in the morning everyone was supposed to report to work at the usual 7:00 time.  We were scheduled to work until 7:00 in the evening.  A full 12 hour day, except for the 30 minutes for lunch (and three breaks).  The reason we had to be told to show up at seven o’clock in the morning was because November 3rd was election day.

It was the normal practice to let the Power Plant Men vote before they came to work in the morning.  We were being told that we were not supposed to vote in the morning and that we could leave early in the evening to go vote instead of voting in the morning.  We were told in no uncertain terms that if we went to vote in the morning, then the amount of time we were late getting to work would be the amount of time we would have to leave at the end of a normal working day.

Let me try to explain what this meant, because on the surface, it looks fairly reasonable.  Since the polls closed at seven in the evening when we would be leaving work, we could leave as early as we wanted in the evening to go vote in order to arrive in time before the polls closed.  There were two things fundamentally wrong with this solution from a Power Plant Man point of view, though from a Plant Manager point of view, it looked quite reasonable.

The first problem was that this was the election between George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton (Now you know why Rush Limbaugh was throwing a fit).  A very large turnout was expected, and a majority of the workers wanted to make sure and go to the polls to vote that day.  With that said, it would be hard to determine what would be a good time to leave the plant to go vote in order to stand in line and cast a vote before the polls closed.  Up to that time, polls had not been kept open later than their designated closing time, except to let people who were already waiting in line by the time the closing bell rang.

The second problem and the main problem was this….. Suppose a person did go vote in the morning…. It was a typical practice for the company to cover that person’s time and pay what was called “Black Time” while they went to vote in the morning.  In this case, the plant manager was telling us that we basically couldn’t go vote in the morning without being “punished”.  If the person waited and voted in the evening, they would lose their overtime which directly affects the bottom line on the home front.

Here is how the punishment would be administered….  If a person went to vote in the morning and was an hour late, and came in, say at eight o’clock instead of seven.  Then they would have to leave when they had completed a regular eight hour day.  That is, they would not receive any overtime that day.

Well.  this didn’t effect me, because I had already early voted a couple of weeks earlier.  I think Scott did too, when we realized we were going to be on overhaul working 12 hour days.  Scott Hubbard and I carpooled together, so we were always careful to coordinate our efforts.

So, guess what happened…. Yeah.  You guessed it…. especially if you knew Jim Kanelakos.  He knew an “injustice” when he saw it, and so, he wasn’t going to let this one slide.  He made sure to go vote the first thing in the morning, just like he had ever since he was old enough to vote.  He arrived at the plant around 9 o’clock.

When he arrived on the Precipitator roof he told me that he had voted that morning and that the line at the polls where he voted was down the block 15 minutes before they opened.  He said he didn’t care what anyone said, he was going to work until 7:00 that evening.  He said, “Just let anyone try to send me home early,” with a big grin on his face and his pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth…. Oh.  Let me remind you what Jim looked like:

This picture reminds me of Jim Kanelakos

This is a picture I found a few years ago on Google Images.  It looked like Jim, so I copied it.  Since then I have received a picture of the crew Jim was working on, so you can see an actual photo:

 

Jim Kanelakos in in the middle in the back (third from the left) with the red plaid shirt standing behind Vonzell Lynn

Well… When Tom Gibson, the Electric Supervisor came around asking if anyone had arrived late that morning, as acting foreman, what could I say?  I told him that Jim Kanelakos had come in two hours late.  Tom told me to send Jim home at 4:30.  He would get his black time for voting early, but he would not receive any overtime for the day.  I told Tom I would tell Jim.  I also told him that Jim had already said that he was going to stay until 7:00 and expected to receive the normal pay that he would have received if he had worked the entire day.

This sent Tom into a rage.  He wanted Jim taken off our crew and sent back to Operations right then and there.  He said that he disobeyed orders and if it was up to him, he would fire him.  I told Tom that we had a ton of work to do and that we needed everyone we could have until the overhaul was over.  If we sent Jim back to Operations for the remainder of the overhaul, we might not be able to finish our work.  We were working on a very tight schedule as it was.

I told Jim that Tom had told me to tell him to go home at 4:30 in the afternoon.  Jim just laughed.  He said he was going to go home at his regular time…. 7:00 pm.  I said, “Ok.  I am just telling you what Tom said.  I’m going to have to tell him your reply.”  Jim, who was my friend, said, “I know.  Do what you have to do.”

I went back to the electric shop and when I walked in the shop Denise Anson, the receptionist paged me on the Gray Phone.  She said I had a call.  I told her to send it to the electric shop office.  I was surprised when I answered the phone and Charles Campbell was on the other end of the line.  News travels fast….  He was an attorney in Stillwater.  He had heard that there was something going on at the plant that might have something to do with vote tampering.

I told him in detail what I knew about Jim Kanelakos and how he had went to vote in the morning after being told that he had to wait until the evening to vote, or he would be docked pay by missing out on scheduled overtime.  I knew that Charles Campbell, unlike some attorneys, was an upstanding citizen in the community and was in no way an ambulance chaser, but when he heard this, I could immediately hear the eagerness in his voice.  I had the impression by his remarks that if this panned out the right (I mean “the wrong”) way, he might be able to retire early.  We ended the conversation by him saying, “Let me know if you hear about anyone that doesn’t get to vote that wanted to because they left work too late.”  He was in total disbelief that the plant had made that policy.

Well, I found Tom Gibson in his office and I told him what Jim had replied to me.  Tom became even more furious.  (I only saw him this mad or his ears this red one other time… but that is another story).  He repeated that he was going to try to have Jim fired for being insubordinate.  This seemed to me to be unlike Tom who was always a very reasonable person.  I don’t think it was anything personal against Jim, I think there was just something about someone who blatantly (in his mind) had ignored a policy that had been clearly given to him the evening before.

I ended up in the Plant Manager, Ron Kilman’s office.  Ron, who took ultimate responsibility for the decision to tell the employees to not vote in the morning listened to Tom tell him what he thought about the whole thing.  I had been in Ron’s office not too long before this incident to tell him that someone had been hacking through our phone system and it surprised me that Ron wanted to find a way to resolve the issue without raising a ruckus or harming anyone, even the perpetrator.  See the post “Turning the Tables on a Power Plant Telephone Interloper“.  When Ron was questioning me about the issue about what to do with Jim, I could tell that Ron really wanted to resolve this issue with as little conflict as possible.

I told Ron that I had talked to my attorney in Stillwater about what was happening and that he was very anxious to find out if anyone either lost any money because they voted early, or they were not able to vote at the end of the day.  Ron said, “Well.  We made this decision yesterday afternoon without really thinking it through.  When the idea was suggested, it sounded like a good plan at the time.  Then today I went and checked to see what we have done in the past, and we have always let people go vote in the morning.”  Ron’s final decision was to let Jim continue working until seven o’clock and receive the proper black time for voting in the morning.  I let Jim know.

Everything would have been all right except for one thing…..  The Law of the Hog.  You see, I had spent considerable time going back and forth throughout the day between the precipitator roof and the office area discussing this topic with both parties involved.  The entire precipitator crew with the exception of Scott Hubbard, did absolutely no work the entire day.  They kept waiting to see what was going to happen.  We were now one day behind schedule.