Power Plant Customer Service Team Gone Wild

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.

IBM Dot Matrix Network Printer

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, and the only other person that I knew that I could write to was Craig Henry, a Corporate Engineer downtown.

 

Craig Henry. Engineer and Gentleman

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 future 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 like to save everything.

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.  In 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!

My Customer Service Team Certificate. This made me official!

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 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 four character ID beginning with a “P”.  So, the  printer in the Electric Shop Office might be…. P123.  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 computer.  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.

Andy Tubbs – True Power Plant Electrician

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:

My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien

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, October 14, 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 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 doable.

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 on 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 was my birthday, so in normal Power Plant Fashion, 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:

The same color of Tom Gibson’s ears

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.

 

James G. Harlow Jr.

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 that route…

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…