Power Plant Quest for the Internet

The electric company in Oklahoma decided late 1995 that it was about time that the employees in the company learn about the Internet.  The company recognized that the vast amount of information on the Internet was very useful and encouraged everyone to start using it.  A request form was available to request access to various features the Internet provided and with your Foreman’s approval, all you had to do was take a short course in Internet Etiquette and you were in (well almost).  The problem with this effort was that no one bothered to teach Plant Management about the Internet, so the “Quest for the Internet” was about to begin.

As the leading computer geek at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma I had been accessing the Internet for years.  I had used CompuServe and Telnet to log into the Internet before Internet Browsers and World  Wide Web (WWW) were available.

A screenshot of the CompuServe Program I was using.

I thought it was a great idea for everyone to use the Internet, so when Alan Kramer gave us the form it didn’t take long before I filled it out.  Sounds pretty simple….. but unfortunately, after a short misstep on my part, a six month battle was about to begin.

My Foreman Alan Kramer

The form was simple enough, you just needed to check the boxes for which part of the Internet you needed to access, and after your foreman signed it, you mailed it to Corporate Headquarters, where you would be scheduled to attend a two hour course on how to properly use the Internet in a business setting.  The form was written in a curious way that sort of indicated to me that not a lot of thought had been put into it.  It was either that, or the person that created the form didn’t understand the Internet very well.  Here’s why:

The different parts of the Internet that you could check that you wanted to access were these:  WWW,  e-mail, Telnet, NewsGroups, FTP.  The World Wide Web (WWW) had yet to become popular.  The number of Web sites on the Internet was still less than 250,000.  Compare that to today where there is almost 1 billion websites.

Well, e-mail…. you know what that is.  Telnet was the usual way I had accessed the Internet for years.  I would log in through the Oklahoma State University computer using Telnet, and from there I had access to almost all of the University computers in the country as well as a lot of the Government computers.  You could actually print out pages and pages of all the computers on the Internet at the time using a simple seek command.

For those of you who don’t know… Before MySpace and Facebook, NewsGroups were used to communicate to people who had similar interests.  They were sort of small blog sites.

On a side note:

I was a member of a number of work related NewsGroups.  One NewsGroup that I was active in was for Precipitators.  There were about 50 people from all over the world in this group and we all were obsessed with working on precipitators.  As it turned out, two of us lived in Stillwater Oklahoma.  The other guy worked for a company called Nomadics that made bomb sniffing detectors called Fido.  They had a tiny precipitator that collected the particles.  We were on the opposite sides of the spectrum.  We had a 70 foot tall, 200 foot wide and 100 foot long precipitator, where his precipitator was tiny.  I thought a few times about applying for a job with them since they were only 4 miles from my house, but, since I wasn’t an engineer I didn’t think I had a chance of being hired.  Besides, what is better than working at a Power plant?

The Nomatics office in Stillwater

End of Side Note.

FTP, the last item on the list stands for File Transport Protocol.  This is how you downloaded or uploaded files after you have used Telnet to connect to a site.

I’m sorry I’m boring you with all this, but I’m explaining them for a reason.  You see… I’m getting to the part where I made my “misstep”.  Maybe it was meant to happen this way, because in the end, everything worked out better than it probably would have if I had just been a little more patient…. Here’s what I did…

After checking each of the boxes, next to WWW, Telnet, NewsGroup, e-mail and FTP, I went to the foremen’s office to have Alan Kramer sign the form so that I could mail it off to Corporate Headquarters.  When I arrived, Alan was gone.  He had left early that day for some reason, so I walked into Jasper Christensen’s office, our Supervisor of Maintenance and asked him to sign it.  Big mistake.

Jasper Christensen

I wrote a post recently about Jasper’s lack of computer knowledge and how I had goaded him for making a dumb computer decision, (see the post “Power Plant Trouble With Angels“).  When I handed him the form, he glanced at it, and I could see the blank look on his face indicating that he didn’t understand the different terms such as Telnet, FTP and e-mail or WWW.  He might have thought he knew what NewsGroups were, but most likely that would have been incorrect.

So, instead of signing the paper, he said, he would review it and get back to me.  Well…. that was unexpected.  The company was encouraging us to use the Internet, so I figured it was pretty much a slam dunk.  From past experience I knew that Jasper was reluctant to approve anything that he didn’t fully understand, which makes some things difficult.

During the “We’ve Got the Power” Program (See the Post:  “Power Plant ‘We’ve Got the Power’ Program“) I tried to elicit an approval from Jasper about a simple example of Thermodynamics that I thought was cut and dry.  Even though I had a sound argument about how heat dissipates in the Air Preheater, he would never say that he would agree.  Only that he understood what I was saying.  So, when Jasper said that he would “get back to me on this” I knew what that meant.  He was going to try to find out what these different things were.

Two weeks later, Alan Kramer told me that Jasper had decided not to approve my request for Internet access.  Somewhat peeved, I went into Jasper’s office and asked him why he wouldn’t approve my request.  He responded with, “Give me reasons in writing why you need each of these items on this form.”  — Oh.  I figured that out right away.  He had tried to find out what these things meant, but (without the Internet), it was hard to find the answers.  So, he was asking me to tell him what these were.

So, I went back to the Electric Shop office and I wrote a full page paper outlining what each item was (WWW, Telnet, NewsGroups, FTP and e-mail).  I also explained why I was requesting access to each of these.  For Telnet and FTP, one of the reasons I used was that I would Telnet into the OSHA computer and download MSDS’s (Material Safety Data Sheets) for chemicals we had at our plant.  The operators had asked me a number of times if I could give them a copy of an MSDS for chemicals.  It is a requirement to keep an MSDS for every chemical on the plant site, and I could easily download them from the OSHA.gov computer.

When I gave my explanation to Jasper, he said he would study it and get back to me later.  Two weeks later, Jasper called me to his office and said that during a staff meeting they had discussed my request for Internet access and they had decided that I didn’t need access to the Internet to do my job.  They had also decided that the only thing on the list that anyone at the plant needed was e-mail and only Jim Arnold (The Supervisor of Operations) and Summer Goebel (The head engineer) needed e-mail.  No one else at the plant needed anything else.  — You can see why I used phrases like “Another Brilliant Idea” when describing some of Jasper’s Management decisions.  Only two people at the plant needed e-mail… .  Sounds funny today, huh?

A few months later, in March 1996, I was sent to Oklahoma City to learn how to install the SAP client on desktop computers.  The way I was chosen was  that someone downtown called each of the Power Plants and other offices and asked the receptionist who the computer geek was at the plant.  Denise Anson, our receptionist gave them my name.  We were supposed to change our entire financial, inventory, maintenance, and billing system over to SAP at the end of the year from our mainframe computer system.  SAP is called an ERP system or Enterprise Resource Planning system.  It combines almost all the computer activities in a company into one package where everything is accessible in one application.

SAP Logo

I will go into the implementation of SAP in more detail in later posts, but for now, I was just learning about installing the client application on the computers at our plant.  There were a number of steps to the installation, and a lot of times it would fail.  So, they gave us some troubleshooting tips and asked us to share any tips we came up with while we were doing this task.

When I returned to the plant, I went about installing SAP on each of the computers.  I think we had 22 computers all together.  Anyway, during this time, I was thinking that after 3 months, I would resubmit my request for the Internet, since after all, now everyone had e-mail since we had installed a computer network at the plant with Novell’s Netware.  It was obvious that we were progressing into the computer age with or without the plant staff.

So, I filled out another request form, and even before asking I wrote up another page of reasons why I could use each of the items on the form.  One new reason was that the Thomas Register was now online.  This was a large set of books that had information about every supplier and vendor in the United States (and beyond).  It was used to find phone number, addresses and other fun stuff about vendors.  A set of books could cost $5,000.00 each and you had to buy them every couple of years to keep them current.

Thomas Register books — This ia Flickr Photo from Dan Paluska: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sixmilliondollardan/3535595281

I didn’t even need to waste my time writing out my reasons.  When I gave the form to Alan, he signed it immediately and handed it back to me.  I thanked him and mailed it off.  A couple of weeks later I received a note through intra-company mail that I was signed up for an Internet class in Oklahoma City.  Since I had been in trouble before with going to classes in Oklahoma City, I made sure I didn’t charge any driving time expenses to go to the class.

The lady who was teaching the class knew who I was, because she had worked with me before on computer issues at the plant.  It was a simple course on computer ettiquette, how the Internet worked and things we should and should not do on the Internet.  At the end of the course, we were told that someone would come by our desk and install the Internet on our computers.  — Well, our plant was 75 miles away and I knew that it was rare to have someone from the Computer Department come out to our plant, so I didn’t expect anything soon.

It was now the summer of 1996.  I was driving down to the river pumps to clean motor filters with Charles Foster when Denise Anson called me on my radio and said that a guy from the SAP team was calling me.  I asked her to patch the call to my Walkie Talkie, and she did.

A Motorola Walkie Talkie like this

It was the guy from Corporate Headquarters leading the effort to install all the client applications on the computers.  He said they were going to have another meeting because everyone was having so much trouble with the installation.  I told him that I had already successfully installed the client on all of the computers at the plant except for one, and that was because it was an old junky one that needed to be re-imaged.

The guy was surprised that we were already finished and said that our site was the first site in the company to complete the installation.  Then he said, “If there is ANYTHING I can do for you, just let me know!”  I glanced over at Charles who was driving the truck and could hear our conversation over the radio, and smiled.

Charles Foster smiling back

I said,  “There’s one thing.  You see.  Our plant is out here in the middle of no where.  I have completed the Internet training course, but we are so far away that no one ever comes around that would install the Internet on my computer, so if you could send me the files, I’ll install it myself.”  He replied, “Sure Thing Buddy!  I’ll share a folder where you can go pick up the files.”

After installing the files, I realized that it was just an Internet Explorer browser.  We were using Windows 3.2 at this time.  After opening the browser and playing around with it for a while, I realized that there wasn’t any control around my username.  That is, anyone could come into our office and log on our computer and use the browser.  Then we found out that you didn’t even have to log on first.  The Internet was wide open.  There were no real controls around the use of the Internet.  The only control was just the lack of a browser on the computer!

Internet Explorer 1.0 (Google image)

So, here is what I did next.  I went to every computer at the plant (except the staff’s computers) and installed the Internet Explorer browser on them.  At each computer, I gave the Power Plant Men the same course I had taken downtown.  I told them what they should do and what they shouldn’t.  I showed them how the browser worked, and how to setup shortcuts, and other things.  Before long every Power Plant Man and Woman at the plant was cruising the Internet except the staff…. After all… they had decided that all they needed was e-mail and only for Summer Goebel and Jim Arnold.

Jim Arnold in all of his awesomeness

A few weeks after I had taught all the Power Plant Men at the plant how to use the Internet, Jasper Christensen’s voice came over the radio…. “Kevin!  I want to see you in my office right away!”.  Okay.  The gig was up.  I recognized that tone of voice from Jasper.  The showdown was about to begin.  I was about to be chewed out for making the Internet available to everyone.  Maybe even fired.  I didn’t know how upset he was going to be when he found out.

As I walked from the Electric Shop to the far corner of the Maintenance Shop to Jasper’s office, I articulated in my mind what I would say.  I had decided that the best defense was to explain that all I did was install the Internet browser on the computers.  I didn’t have access to actually grant anyone access to the Internet.  If everyone has access to the Internet, it isn’t because I gave them access.  — This was true.

I took a deep breath just before entering Jasper’s office.  I went in his office with the most straight face I could muster.  “Here it comes,” I thought….  the six month battle for the Internet is coming to a head.  Jasper said, “I want to ask you a question about the Internet.”  Trying not to choke on my words and looking as if I was interested by cocking my head a little, I replied, “Yeah?  What is it?”  I was conscious of my thumb hanging in my right front pocket.

Then Jasper picked up a magazine sitting on his desk and said,  “There is this article in this engineering magazine, and it has this website that you can visit.  How would I go to that site?”  — Oh my Gosh!!!!  I wanted to laugh out loud with joy!  I wasn’t about to be chewed out at all.  He just wanted the computer geek to show him how to use the Internet browser that had been recently installed on his computer!

Jasper obviously hadn’t taken the Internet course, otherwise he would know where the address bar is at the top……  So, I said, “Let me show you.”  I walked over to his computer and walked him through each step of the process.  When we were done, he turned to look at me and smiled.  He said, “Thank you.”  I said, “Anytime.  Just let me know if you have any other questions.”  I turned and walked out of the office.

As I walked back to the Electric Shop Office, I met Charles Foster who wanted to know how it went, as he had heard Jasper call me on the radio.  I told him that the battle for the Internet was now over.  Jasper has now become a “user”.  Life was good.