Favorites Post #93
Originally posted March 21, 2015
Okay, so, no one ever called me an Angel unless it was one of the fallen type. I suppose the closest was when Bill Bennett, our A Foreman at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma would call me a scamp. I don’t know why, but I always seemed to be in trouble over one thing or another. Well… maybe I do know why.
Not long after Bill Bennett left during the downsizing in 1994, when our Supervisor over Maintenance was Jasper Christensen, we had received newer computers all around the plant. That is, except for the Electric Shop, because we had acquired one a year or so before so that we could program Eeprom Chips.
An Eeprom Chip used in the preicpitator controls
I helped install the computers all around the plant. I had run the Ethernet cables and installed the jacks so they could be connected to the plant computer network. I had become the computer person for the plant by default, since I had learned how everything worked on my own.
When we received all the new computers, we were told that we had to keep an inventory of all the computer programs that we were using on each computer to make sure that we weren’t using pirated software (like that every happened). So, when we installed any program on a computer we were supposed to notify our Supervisor, who in this case was Jasper Christensen.
Jasper Christensen
I sort of felt sorry for Jasper at times, because, it’s sort of like when you don’t get to choose your parents…. Jasper didn’t get to choose who was working for him exactly. So, he was stuck with me.
I’m not saying that I was a bad person, or that I wasn’t good at being an electrician. I was just annoying. I was always up to some sort of something that no one really told me to do.
One example of this was that I had a CompuServe account, and I would use it to access stock quotes at the end of the day. I would save them to a file, and then each week, I would pin up charts of our 401k stocks on the bulletin board in the electric shop. Power Plant Men would come into the shop to see how their stocks were doing. At this time, the “Internet” hadn’t been introduced to the plant and people didn’t really know much about it. I would connect to CompuServe through a dial up modem.
A screenshot of the CompuServe Program I was using.
I had a 14,400 baud modem with compression that made it more like 104,000 baud which was really fast for that time. However, when the World Wide Web became available to CompuServe users, I found that even at that speed, it took a long time just to load one web page if it had a picture on it. The Internet was just around the corner. I’ll write a post about how it was introduced at the plant next week. (See the post “Power Plant Quest for the Internet“).
I diligently kept a log of all the software we had on our company computer. Whenever I would upgrade CompuServe to the latest version, I would send a form to Jasper letting him know that I now had that version of software on the electric shop computer. We also had installed other software, such as Reflex, which was sort of a hybrid between Excel and Access. This was still a DOS based computer. Windows 3.1 was on it, but a lot of our programs were still run in the DOS mode.
About 6 months after all the new computers arrived, we requested that the computer in the electric shop be replaced, because it was older, and we were using it for more and more things. The computer arrived about a month after it was approved.
This time, an IT guy from Oklahoma City brought the computer to the plant. This computer was better than all the other computers in the plant, mainly because it was newer. At that time, computers were quickly improving. If you waited six months more it would have even been a better computer. While the IT guy was in the neighborhood, he installed some software on all the computers.
I was working on the roof of the Unit 2 Precipitator with Charles Foster the day that the Electric Shop received the new computer. Alan Kramer, our Foreman, called me on the radio (walkie talkie)… He did this because we were using radios a lot more, and were talking about shutting down the Gray Phone PA system all together.
A Motorola Walkie Talkie like this
Alan said that Jasper wanted to use the new Electric Shop computer at the Conoco Cogen (which stands for Cogeneration) plant in Ponca City. We needed to take it to Ponca City and use the computer that was there for the electric shop. — Before I tell you my response…. let me tell you about the computer at the Cogen plant.
First, let me explain what a Cogeneration plant is…. This is a small power plant that uses waste gases from the Conoco (Continental Oil) Oil Refinery to create steam to turn the generator to produce electricity. In exchange for using the waste gases from the refinery, the Power Plant gave any left over steam back to the refinery so they could use it in their refinery. Plus, we would give the refinery the electricity that we produced. Any electricity left over, we sold to our customers. (See the post “What Coal-fired Power Plant Electricians are doing at an Oil Refinery“).
So, there was a desktop computer sitting on a desk in a small control room that allowed the control room at our power plant to dial into it and monitor the plant to see how it was working. The connection was rather slow even though it had a dedicated phone line to connect to the plant.
The computer itself, even though it was somewhat older than the new computer we received for the electric shop, was sitting idle most of the time. Even when it was working, it was never processing much. The problem with the computer being slow wasn’t the computer itself, it was the network connection back to the plant.
So, when Jasper had said that he was going to replace that computer with our much faster one that we had ordered, I was a little perturbed. This meant that the nice new fast computer that we had specially ordered so that we could do our job was going to be sitting idle in Ponca City collecting dust doing next to nothing and it wasn’t going to make anything faster as far as the control room was concerned and we would be stuck with a computer that was somewhat older than the one that the computer person had just replaced. (Wait! Did I just write a 73 word sentence! – my English Professor from College would shutter at the sight).
So, in the most smarmy voice I could muster I replied over the radio, “Oh Great! Another one of Jasper’s ‘Scathingly Brilliant Ideas’!” I knew the phrase “Scathingly Brilliant Idea” from the movie “Trouble With Angels”. It seemed like an appropriate remark at the time.
Trouble With Angels
I knew that Jasper would be listening, because he had his walkie talkie set on scan so that he could hear everything we were saying. Alan Kramer came right back after my remark and said, “Watch it Kevin. You know who might be listening.” I said, “Oh. I know who’s listening.”
Approximately five minutes later, Jasper Christensen called me on the radio and asked me to meet him in his office. “Okay. Here it comes,” I thought. On my way down from the roof of the precipitator I was formulating my argument as to why it was a terrible idea to take the best computer at the plant and send it to Ponca City to sit idle in a room by itself when I could easily put it to a lot of use. I never really was able to present my arguments.
When I arrived at Jasper’s office, he told me that he wanted me to take CompuServe off of the computer in the electric shop. I knew why. I thought I knew why. I figured it was because I had just insulted him on the radio. I’m sure that was part of it, but it wasn’t the only reason.
I pressed Jasper on the issue and told him that I used CompuServe to download the stock prices for our 401k so that everyone can see how their stocks are doing and I post them on the bulletin board. Jasper came back with “That has nothing to do with your job.” I replied with, “I’m providing a service for our teams, just like the candy and coke machines. I’m paying for the service myself. I’m not charging anything.” Jasper disagreed that I was providing a useful service.
Then Jasper said that the IT guy found a virus on one of the computers and since I was the only person at the plant that had connected to anything like CompuServe, the virus must have come from me. When I asked him which computer had the virus, he didn’t know. I told Jasper I better go find out, because if there was a virus on one of the computers, we need to clean it up right away.
This was at a time when McAfee’s Viruscan software was freeware. I always had an updated copy of it that I would run on the computers. I had checked all the computers at the plant recently, so I was surprised to hear that one of them had a virus. Jasper told me that the IT guy was up in Bill Green’s office. Bill Green was the plant manager.
Bill Green
As I was leaving Jasper’s office, I paused and turned around and asked Jasper one last question….. “Do you want me to only remove the CompuServe application, or do you want me to stop accessing CompuServe? Because I can access CompuServe without the application on the computer. The application just makes it easier to navigate around.” This question puzzled Jasper. He said he would have to get back at me on that. — So, at that point (I thought to myself), I’ll wait until Jasper gets back to me on that before I remove the software.
I knew that he knew nothing about computers, and I knew that this would confuse him. That’s why I asked it. I wanted him to know that if he made me remove CompuServe because he was mad at me for making my smart-aleck remark about moving the computer to Ponca City it wasn’t going to make much difference to me anyway.
So, I walked back up to him as he was sitting at his desk, and I said using a serious tone, “Jasper. I know that I’m the only person in this plant that has given you a list of all the programs on the computer I use. I let you know every time I even upgrade to a new version. I am the only person in the plant that follows the rules when it comes to what is on the computers. I know that there has been personal software added to just about every computer at this plant. I am the only person that has told you what software I am using. So, just keep it in mind that you are trying to punish the only person that is following the rules.” Then I turned and left.
I went upstairs to Bill Green’s office where I found the IT guy running a scan on Bill’s computer. I asked him about the virus he found. He said that he was running a Microsoft virus scanner on the computers and on the one in the chemists lab, there was one file that was questionable. The scan said it was a possible virus, but couldn’t tell what virus it was.
I asked the IT guy what the name of the file was. He handed me a post it note with the file name on it. I recognized it right away. It was a GLink file. GLink is the application that we used to access the mainframe computer in order to work on our Maintenance Orders, or to look up parts, and any other computer related activities.
This is GLink today. Back then it was for Windows 3.1
I had been given a beta test version of GLink that I installed on the Chemists computer for Toby O’Brien about a year earlier when he asked me to help him find a way to connect to the Prime computer downtown so that he could work on CAD drawings from the plant. IT had sent this Beta version of GLink to me because it could connect to the switch twice as fast as the current GLink and they were glad to let us try it out. (See the post “Toby O’Brien and Doing the Impossible“).
Power Plant Engineer and Good Friend – Toby O’Brien
About that time, Bill Green came into the office and I told him that the “supposed” (pronounced “suppose Ed”) virus on the Chemist computer was given to us by IT and that it probably wasn’t a virus anyway, it just acted like one because it connected to a switch a certain way which was unusual. The IT guy was still standing there and he agreed that it just indicated that it might be a virus and probably wasn’t really one.
Then I told Bill Green that Jasper had told me to remove CompuServe from the computer in our shop. He said that he and Jasper had talked about it and were concerned that I might download a virus from CompuServe. I assured him that I only downloaded stock prices and MSDS sheets (Material Safety Data Sheets) from OSHA. Everything I downloaded was in text format and would not contain a virus.
The IT guy agreed that at that time, CompuServe was very careful about viruses as they had been hit with one about 6 months earlier. Now they scanned everything they let you download. Bill said, “Well, that’s between you and Jasper.” — That’s all I needed to hear. I knew that Jasper would forget about it and never “get back with me” on it.
As you can tell, if you’ve been reading the posts this year, I am constantly becoming more involved in computers at this point in my career. For good or bad, it was a concern for people like Jasper and Bill. I knew a lot more than they did to the point that they would call me to help them learn how to use their computers. They didn’t know if they could trust me. Luckily for them, even though I was mischievous, I wouldn’t do anything to invade someone’s privacy, or hurt plant operations.
It did seem like I was always in trouble over one thing or another. It was often brought on by someone’s misunderstanding about what the problem really was, and their feeble incorrect attempt to fix it…. and… well….(let’s face it) my big mouth.
Power Plant Men 