Hitting the Power Plant HR Cardboard Ceiling

I spent 12 weeks in Oklahoma City in 1996 working in an office building while the Power Plant Men came to the rescue and caused a culture shock for some who had never experienced a group of Power Plant Men so closely packed in an office cubicle before.  The effect can almost be the same as if you have too many radioactive particles compressed together causing a chain reaction ending in a tremendous explosion.  Having survived this experience I became intrigued with the idea of working in an office on a computer instead of carrying a tool bucket up 25 flights of stairs to fix the boiler elevator.

Our team had been in Oklahoma City when we were converting the Electric Company in Oklahoma to a new financial and planning system known as SAP.  See the post:  “Corporate Executive Kent Norris Meets Power Plant Men“.  One other person from out plant was in Oklahoma City for the entire 9 months it took to roll out SAP.  That was Linda Dallas, our HR Supervisor at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.

SAP Logo

Linda Dallas was on the core SAP team which was a coveted spot for one not so obvious reason.  The few people that were on the core team were learning how to implement SAP in a fairly large public electric company.  The consulting company Ernst and Young were teaching them how to build SAP screens and configure the application as well as how to run a large project.  —  Do you see where I’m going?

I went out and bought a book on programming SAP myself just in case I had a chance to play around with it when we were in Oklahoma City. I read the book, but unfortunately the opportunity to mess with SAP never came up.

A programming book like this

Mark Romano, the engineer that was coordinating our efforts during the project tried to have me assigned to the testing team for SAP, but the SAP guys said they didn’t need anyone else…. For more about Mark Romano, read this post:  “Power Plant Marine Battles with God and Wins“.  Consequently, when Mark told me that the testing team positions were just as coveted as the core team and they didn’t want an outsider coming in and showing them up, I understood.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet…. SAP was an up and coming terrific software package that took practically your entire company’s computer activities and put them in one all encompassing application.  People experienced in SAP were far and few between, so anyone looking for people with SAP experience were finding the pickin’s rather slim.  Because of this, most of the people involved in the core SAP implementation could basically write their ticket when it came to finding a job with a company trying to implement SAP in 1996-97.

I thanked Mark for putting in a good word for me with the testing team.  I also told him that the first time I actually am able to use SAP, I will break it within 10 minutes just so the testing team can see how it’s done.  —  I had a lot of experience with “Negative testing” as it is called in IT.  That is when you do what you can to try to break the application.

I like the word “consequently” today, so I’m going to use it again…. Consequently, when Linda Dallas came back to our plant to show us all how to use SAP, here is what happened….

We went to the small conference room where I had setup about 15 computers all hooked up to the company’s Intranet.  The team from Oklahoma City had actually brought the computers.  I had just run all the network cables to the room so they could train people 15 at a time.  The trainers wanted to “lock down” the computers so that they only had SAP on them and not other things like “Solitaire” that might distract the Power Plant Trainees.

Here is what happened when I showed up for my class….  Linda Dallas was teaching it along with one other guy from Corporate Headquarters…. I’ll call him “Jack”… for various reasons, but mainly because I can’t remember his name…  Jack told us that the computers we were using were stripped down so that it didn’t have games like Minesweeper and Solitaire on them, (as did all the regular Windows NT computers).

The first thing I did when he told us that was to browse over to the electric shop computer through the network and copy the minesweeper and the solitaire games from the computer in the electric shop to my training computer…..  See how rotten I used to be (yeah… used to be…  Huh?  What’s that?)…  Then I opened Solitaire and started playing it while they explained how to go into SAP and start doing our jobs.

They showed us the Inventory section.  That had all the parts in the company in it.  That was the part of the application I had helped implement in our small way.

When they showed us the inventory section, I realized right away how I could break SAP, so I proceeded to open 10 different screens of the SAP client, and began some crazy wildcard searches on each one of them.  The application came to a grinding halt. (for any developers reading this… let’s call it… “SQL Injection”).

Linda, who was trying to show us how to go from screen-to-screen suddenly was staring at a screen that was going no where.  She tried to explain that they were still having some performance issues with the application….

I just stared at my own computer screen trying to figure out if I had a red ten to put on the black jack….  when a red-faced Jack came around the tables and saw me playing Solitaire.  I just smiled up at him and he had a confused look on his face as we waited for the screen on the projector to begin working again.

My screen at the time

I knew of course what had happened and after about 5 minutes of everyone’s screen being locked up, the application finally began working again and the training continued.  — I was happy.  I had completed my testing that the testing team didn’t think they needed.  Of course, I did it to honor Mark Romano’s failed attempt to have me moved to the SAP testing team.

Mark Romano

A couple of years later when I was working with Ray Eberle on a Saturday (as we were working 4 – 10s, and rotated onto a Saturday once every 4 weeks), I showed him how I could lock up SAP for the entire company any time I wanted.  Since few people were working on Saturday, I figured I could show him how it was done without causing a raucous.  It took about 35 seconds and SAP would be down for as long as I wanted.  There was a way to prevent this… but…. If the testers never test it, they would never tell the developers to fix it (I’m sure they have fixed it by now… that was 18 years ago).

Ray Eberle

Anyway, the story about implementing SAP isn’t really what this post is about.  It is just the preamble that explains why in the spring of 1997, Linda Dallas left as the Supervisor of HR at our plant.  She found another job in Dallas with some of the other core SAP team members implementing SAP.

When the job opening for Linda Dallas’s job came out at our plant, I figured that since I met the minimum qualification, I might as well apply for it.  Why not.  It would mean putting away my tool bucket and working on the computer a lot more, which was something I was interested in since my experience a few months earlier when I was working at Corporate Headquarters.

I knew right away that no one would really take my job application seriously.  I had all the computer related skills.  I had a degree in Psychology, and a Masters in Religious Education from Loyola with a focus on adult education.  That wasn’t really the point.  I had never been a clerk.

The natural progression of things meant that the only “real” possible pool of applicants were the women clerks in the front office.  Specifically Louise Kalicki.  Her desk was closest to Linda Dallas’s office, so, in a sense, she was “next-in-line”.

Even though I knew that the plant manager Bill Green and Jim Arnold the Maintenance Supervisor would never want me on the “staff”, I went ahead and applied for the job anyway.  I figured, it was worth the experience to apply and go through the interview process even though I wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Bill Green

I think Louise and I were the only two to apply for the job.  Maybe Linda Shiever did as well, as she had the most seniority at the plant.  Linda was actually the first person hired at the plant when it was first built.  Louise had been filling in for Linda Dallas for the past year while Linda Dallas had been in Oklahoma City working on SAP, so it was really a “shoe-in” for the job.

When I went up to the interview, the first thing I had to do was take a timed typing test to see if I could type 35 words a minute (I could type 70).  I had dressed up for the interview so that when I walked into the plant manager’s office, Bill Green and Jim Arnold had a little “Hee Haw” about seeing me without coal dust and fly ash coming out of my nose and ears.  I told them that “I can get cleaned up when I needed to” (notice that I used the word “get” and ended my sentence with a preposition… just so they didn’t think I was too stuck up.  See the post:  “Power Plant Men Learned Themselves Proper English“).

No one was surprised when Louise Kalicki was promoted to HR Supervisor.  She was probably the best choice when you think about it.  She had a better relationship with Bill Green and Jim Arnold than I did and a good part of the job was working with those two rascals (oh… did I actually call them rascals?  Bless their hearts).

This was right around the time that I had made my decision to go back to school to work toward a degree in Computer Science.  Working with computers was really my passion.

I have an interesting way of making decisions about what I’m going to do with my life.  I let certain events help make the decisions, instead of just jumping right in.  I had decided (knowing that it was pretty much a safe bet) that if I didn’t get the job as the HR Supervisor, then I would go down to Oklahoma State University just a few miles from my house and enroll in the Arts and Science College and work on a degree in Computer Science.

I made a lot of decisions that way.  I figured that if I was meant to do something, then it would work out that way.  If not, then, fine, I would go a different route.

Ok.  One more side story about working with Ray Eberle and SAP (See the post:  “Tales of Power Plant Prowess by Ray Eberle“)…  This happened some time around the year 2000.

SAP had this icon of a drip of water dropping and causing a ripple of waves….

SAP water drops

When the application was thinking, this picture was in the upper right hand corner and it was animated, so that the water rippled out as the water dripped.  That way you could tell the difference between the application being stuck and just thinking.

This wasn’t just an animated GIF as we might have today.  It was actually a series of bitmap pictures that were all strung together into one file.  Once I figured this out, I used Paint to modify the picture.  I created three new versions….  The first one had a small ship with sails sailing across the rippling water.  The second one had a yellow fish that would leap out of the water over and over.

It was the third picture that was my masterpiece.  I reversed the flow, so that instead of the water rippling out, it came in as if it was a whirlpool sucking things down.  Then I added a small picture of our HR Supervisor’s face being sucked down into the whirlpool.

HR Supervisor sucked down a whirlpool

Then I created a small application that allowed people to change their water rippling animated picture to any of the four (with the regular picture being the fourth option) that they wanted quickly and easily.  I know the women in the front office liked the one with the HR supervisor being sucked down the whirlpool the best.  I won’t mention who they were, but by the following two pictures, you may be able to guess….

Linda Shiever

Darlene Mitchell

I would think that Bill Green would have liked the sailing ship the best since he liked to sail…. though… for some reason, I never made it around to install my “SAP add-on” on his computer (or Louise Kalicki’s for that matter, since she was the HR Supervisor).  Most of the Power Plant Men probably would like the fish jumping out of the water, since they liked fishing.  — I know… I know… I was being rotten… but it was fun.

Ok.  End of the Side Story and end of the post.