Power Plant Phrases Fit for Mixed Company (almost)

Great people in history are known for their great quotes.  Take Albert Einstein for instance.  We automatically think of the one most famous thing that Einstein said whenever we hear his name.  We think of “E equals M C squared.” (which explains the direct relationship between energy and matter).

Albert Einstein

In more recent history, we have Gomer Pyle saying:  “Golly”, only it was drawn out so that it was more like “Go-o-o-o-llyyyyyy” (which expresses the improbable relationship between Gomer and the real Marines).

Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle on the virge of exclaiming his favorite word

Then there was the famous line by officer Harry Callahan when he said…. “Go Ahead.  Make My Day!” (which demonstrates the exact relationship showing how guns don’t kill people.  People kill people).

Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry

Even more recently, we heard the famous words of Arnold Jackson while talking to his brother when he said, “What you talkin’ ’bout Willis?” (which supports the commonly held understanding that ‘Inquiring minds want to know”).

Gary Coleman as Arnold in Different Strokes

Great people are known for their great quotes.

This is true in the power plant kingdom as well.  I have passed on the imcomparable wisdom of Sonny Karcher in the post:  Power Plant Innovations and Imitations of Sonny Karcher.  When you told him something that he found totally amazing, he would look you right in the eye with an expression of total amazement and would say, “Well….. S__t the bed!” (only, he would include the word “hi” in the middle of that first word).

I had to run home and try it on my parents during dinner one night when I first heard this as a summer help…. at first they were too proud of me to speak.  When they couldn’t contain their amazement any longer, they both burst out into laughter as I continued eating my mashed potatoes.

When I became an electrician, I belonged to a group of wise souls with a multitude of quotes.  I would stare in amazement as I tried to soak them all into my thick skull.  Every once in a while one would squeeze in there and I would remember it.

When talking about the weather, Diana Lucas (later Brien, formerly Laughery) would say, “Chili today, Hot Tamale”.  I know there were a lot more like that one.

I invite any power plant men that remember these phrases to leave a comment at the bottom of this post with a list of phrases used, because I liked to forget them so that the next time I would hear them, it would be like hearing them for the first time all over again.

Andy Tubbs would say something like “Snot me.  Statue” (I am not sure if I am even saying that right…).  I know that Andy had a dozen other phrases like this one.

There was an old man named John Pitts that used to work at the old Osage Plant.  I wrote about this plant in an earlier Post called Pioneers of Power Plant Fame Finally Find Peace.  He would come out to our plant to work out of the electric shop on overhaul to make a few extra dollars.

One day at the end of the day, when we were all leaving for the parking lot, Andy Tubbs stepped out of the door shaking his head as if in disbelief.  He had a big grin on his face, so I asked him why.

Andy said that he had asked John Pitts “What d’ya know.”  John had said something that didn’t make sense, so Andy had asked him what he had said.  I asked Andy what John had said.  Andy told me that John Pitts had said, “It takes a big dog to weigh a ton.”  When this confused Andy, he asked him for clarification, and John had replied, “Well.  You asked me what I know, and I know that it takes a big dog to weigh a ton.” —  You can mark that one down as a famous quote from John Pitts.

Our A foreman was a tall thin black man named Bill Bennett.  He would walk into the electric shop office during lunch and sit down next to me.  He would look at me with a look of total disgust.  Shaking his head with disappointment, he would say to me…. “You Scamp!”  He might throw in another line like, “You disgust me.” (with the emphasis on the word “disgust) or he might say “You slut.”  It was times like these that I knew that Bill really cared about me.  I mean… he wouldn’t say those things to just anybody.

Bill accidentally said that last phrase to Diana when she had walked into the room just after he had graced me with those words.  She stood there for about one second stunned that Bill had said that to her, then she turned around and walked right back out.

I asked him what he had said, because his back was to me at the time, and he had said it under his breath like he had to me and I couldn’t hear what he said…. but I did catch the look on Diana’s face, and it wasn’t a happy expression.

He told me, and he said he probably just made a terrible mistake.  I’m sure once Diana thought about it twice she would have realized that this was Bill’s way of passing on his endearment toward you.

Charles Foster was my foreman for my first year as an electrician trainee.  He was my friend for all 18 years I spent as an electrician.  I had the habit when I was trying to think about something of starting my sentence with the word “Well….” and then pausing.  Charles would invariably finish my thought with “…that’s a deep subject.”

The first time, my reaction was like Andy’s when John Pitt told him that it took a big dog to weigh a ton.  I said, “What?”  He replied.  “Well….   That’s a deep subject.”  Ok.  I know….  I’m slow.

Each morning when Charles would walk into the electric shop office, or when I would walk in and Charles would already be there, I would say, “good morning.”  Charles would say, “Mornin’ Glory.”  In the time I was in the electric shop, I must have heard that phrase over 1,000 times.

One time we were on a major overhaul on Unit 1, and we were doing check out on all the alarms in the plant that weren’t specific to Unit 2.  When you do that, you go to the various devices and mimic sending the alarm by either activating a device or putting a jumper across the contacts that would send in the alarm.

In order to perform this task, we found early on that there were two people in the shop that you couldn’t assign to this job.  One person was Bill Ennis.

Bill Ennis was a middle aged (ok.  well… older) fellow that owned a Coast-To-Coast store in Perry, Oklahoma.

Gee. This might be a picture of the actual store. Bill’s store had a motel associated with it just like this one.

The reason you couldn’t assign Bill to do alarm checks was best put by Bill Ennis himself.  He said it like this.  “I’m blind in one eye, and I can’t see out of the other.”  This was Bill’s famous power plant quote.  What he meant was that he was color blind in one eye and he was literally blind in the other.  So, he really was “blind” in one eye, and couldn’t see out of the other.

In order to do alarm checks, you needed to be able to locate wires some times by color.  Well… Green and red both look the same to Bill Ennis.

If you are not color blind, you can see the number 62 in this picture.

If you are color blind, this is what you see.

So, you see, that wouldn’t be good.

The other person you didn’t want to have doing alarm checks was Charles Foster.  As we found out later, this was because he has Dyslexia.  So, even if he could read the 62 in the picture above, he might see it as a 26.

During alarm checks one person has to stay in the control room and watch the alarm monitor and the alarm printouts.  So, as we would send in alarms to the control room the person in the control room would reply to us telling us which alarms came in.  He would read the number on the screen or the printout.

In the spring of 1986, the person that was elected to sit in the control room all day and watch the alarm panel was Gary Wehunt.  He was new at the plant, and didn’t know his way around much, so it was easier for him to perform this job.

The only problem was that Gary had a habit of not paying attention.  He would either be daydreaming or he would be talking to someone in the control room about something other than the benefits of having a reliable alarm monitoring system.

So, while Dee (Diana), Andy and I were running around the plant sending alarms into the control room, we would be sitting there waiting for a response from Gary telling us what alarms he received.  When he wouldn’t reply, we might call on the radio…. Gary, did you get an alarm?

Gary would always reply the same way.  “Just now came in.”  Well… we knew it didn’t take that long for an alarm to come into the control room, as the control room needed to know immediately when there was an alarm.  So, some times we would send the same alarm about 20 times in a row one right after the other waiting for Gary to tell us that he received the alarm.

Finally we would just have to key the radio to call Gary, and he would jump in there and say, “Just now came in.”  We had about 2,000 alarms to check, and you want to be able to move from alarm to alarm rapidly once you finally make it to a position where there are a number of alarms in the same area.  But this was slowing us down.

We tried different ways to “remind” Gary that we needed to know immediately when the alarms came in, and we needed to have him give us the number of the alarm as well.  But all during the overhaul, we would receive the same response from Gary…. “Just now came in.”

The last phrase that I will mention was said by Mike Rose.  He was an Englishman that had moved to the U.S. from Canada where he had worked with the railroad.  He pointed out that a Diesel engine is really an electrical generator.  A diesel engine on a train is really pulling the train using electricity generated by a turbine generator turned by a diesel engine.

I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I remember the phrase well, as it became a well used phrase in our shop after we heard it for the first time from Mike Rose.  The phrase was, “Ain’t my mota.”  (in this case “mota” is a slang word for motor).

So, Mike was replying to a comment that some motor was not working properly, or had burned up all together by saying “Ain’t my mota.”  Which meant, “it isn’t my worry.”  Actually, this was pretty much Mike’s philosophy of life altogether.

Art Hammond and I would jokingly use the phrase, “Ain’t my mota.”  When faced with an obvious task that was our worry.  We might stop in the middle of our work and look at one another and say, “Well…. It ain’t my mota.”  then continue working away.

When I was working in Global Employee Services Support at Dell, where I work today, during a particular project our project team had come up with the phrase, “Nobody’s gonna die.”  Which meant that when we go live with our project, if something goes wrong, everything will be all right, because… “Nobody’s gonna die.”  Meaning that it isn’t going to be so bad that we can’t fix it.

When the project was over we were given tee-shirts that said on the back, “Nobody Died”.  This phrase reminds me of Mike Rose’s phrase “Ain’t my Mota.”

I tried to remember any phrases I came up with myself, but I’m either just not that creative, or I have just “forgotten more than I ever knew” (which is an actual phrase used by my mother once).  I was more into singing songs like Richard Moravek, when he would sing “Nestle’s makes the very best Chocolate” with Jay Harris at the Muskogee Power plant each morning before going to work.

I would break out into song by belting out the Brady Bunch song, or the Beverly Hillbillies, or some such thng.  I would also make some songs up like the one about Ronnie Banks on the Labor Crew to the tune of the William Tell Overture (The Lone Ranger galloping song for the more western educated readers)…. by singing, “Ronnie Banks, Ronnie Banks, Ronnie Banks, Banks, Banks.”

Or I would sing the Wizard of Oz like this.  “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz, because because because because…. because because because because…”  No… no great quotes from me.

Ok.  I do remember borrowing a phrase from the movie, “Trouble with Angels.” with Haley Mills, when she would say, “Another Brilliant Idea.”

Trouble With Angels

Only when I said it, it was usually for a very sarcastic reason….  For instance, (and I will write about this much later), I remember announcing on the radio on an open channel one day that this was “Another one of Jasper’s ‘Brilliant’ Ideas”  I was called to his office later that day, but as you will see when I write that much later post, that it turned out it wasn’t because of the remark I had made on the channel I knew he was monitoring (much to my surprise).