The 101st “Rest Of” Power Plant Post

Originally posted on 8/15/2015

Power Plant Men working for a large Coal-Fired Power Plant have the kind of culture where Cleanliness is next to “Leroy Godfrey-ness”.  If you knew Leroy Godfrey, then you would know that he was a perfectionist in a lot of ways.  Or… Well, he expected the Plant Electricians to be anyway.  A few years after becoming an electrician, there was some work being done by Ben Davis, one of our best electricians, at the Conoco (Continental) Oil Refinery twenty miles north of the plant in Ponca City.

Conoco (Now Philips 66) Oil refinery in Ponca City

Being a low level Electrician Apprentice, I was not included in whatever was happening at the Refinery.  I didn’t work at the refinery for many years.  When I finally did go to Conoco, I wished I hadn’t.

What was happening?  A Co-Generation plant was being built there.  It is called a “Co-Generation” plant because it serves two purposes.  Waste gas from the refinery is used to fire the boiler that produces the steam to turn the turbine.  Any steam left over is sent over to the refinery to supplement their own needs.  The electricity is used by the refinery and any left over electricity is sold by the Electric Company for a profit.  So, in a sense, it is a “Co-Existence”.

For the most part, Power Plant Men were looking for opportunities to get in a company truck and leave the plant grounds to work on something outside the confines of the plant where they work every day, week in and week out.  Trips to the river pumps or the parks on our lake were always nice, because you would see wildlife along the way.  You could look out over the Arkansas River in the morning as the sun was rising and feel the cool breeze and smell the pastures nearby.

Trips to Enid to our small peaking units were fun too, because we were able to work on some different equipment out in a quiet substation where mud daubers were the only sound until the units came online.  The drive to Enid was nice because the 45 mile trip across the countryside is pleasant and the traffic is very light.  You can go for miles without seeing another car.

After only a couple of visits to the Conoco Oil Refinery, I never looked forward to the 20 minute drive from the plant when we had to work on the Co-Generation Plant co-owned by our company and the Oil Refinery.  There were a few things about the refinery that bothered me about working there.  One annoying factor was the hideous smell.

I had lived in Ponca City for three years and the sour odor that poured out of the Oil Refinery to the south of our house generally blew right up our street.  One winter morning I remember stepping out of our rental house into the dark on my way to work, and the exhaust from the oil refinery must have been blowing directly down the street to our house where I lived because when I took a breath I gagged immediately and was at the point of vomiting on the front lawn.

The house we rented in Ponca City, Oklahoma in 1986-89 with about 600 sq. ft. of living space

A side note…

My wife and I lived in this tiny house shortly after we were married.  Kelly was an RN (nurse) at the local hospital working the night shift while I was an electrician at the Power Plant during the day.  I had the philosophy that if we started by living in a dump and saved our money, then as we gradually worked our way up to a bigger house, we would feel as if life was getting better, and we never had to worry about money, since we always lived well below our means.

I figured that if we lived far below our means, our means would keep growing.  Living just below your means meant always staying in the same economic spot (how many sentences can I put the words “means” and “meant” right next to each other?).  The quality of Life doesn’t get much better.  When living well below your means, life continues to get better even if your job stays the same your entire life.  I had figured that I was going to be a plant electrician until the day I retired, so, this was my way of planning ahead.

My wife endured living in this tiny house one block away from the railroad tracks traveled by the coal trains on their way to our plant (which shook our house as they passed) for three years before we moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma where we lived with more than twice the square feet and no smell from the oil refinery.

end of side note…

I started out by saying that the culture at our Power Plant was that Cleanliness was very important.  I suppose this was true at the Oil Refinery as well, only, it seemed that even though the clutter was all picked up, there was something “inherently” dirty about the oil refinery.  I’m not sure how to describe it, but you just felt like you didn’t want to touch anything because it was going to leave some sort of dirty film on you.  It was….. grimy (one could say… oily… well… it was an oil refinery).

Our Power Plant is in North Central Oklahoma, and during the summer going for an entire month with over 100 degree weather every day was not uncommon.  There are parts of the plant where you had to work some times where the temperature reached 160 degrees.  Of course, you can’t stay in that environment very long, and those areas are generally not the areas of choice when choosing which job to work on next.

One hot summer day in 1996, Charles Foster and I had to go to the oil refinery to our Co-Generation plant to fix an Air Conditioner Condenser Fan Motor.

Charles Foster

This isn’t like one of those fans on the side of your house in the box that you know as your “air conditioner” that blows hot air out when the air conditioner in your house is running, though it performs the same task, only on a much bigger scale.

No.  Even bigger than this air conditioner

When you entered the oil refinery you had to wear a long blue cloak or coat called “Nomex” (pronounced “No Mex”).

A Blue Nomex Coat  which can be worn by Mexicans.  That rumor is just not true.

The reason for wearing this heavy “woolen” coat was to help save your life in case you happened to be around the next time (next time?) something exploded, blasting flames in your direction.  — Yeah…. comforting huh?  Knowing that this flame retardant coat was going to keep you from being burned alive when something exploded in the refinery.  Oh joy.

Everyone in the refinery was wearing these blue coats.  It was a requirement before you could drive your pickup through the security gate.

Once inside the gate, Charles and I checked our clearances to make sure it was safe to work on unwiring the motor that was mounted under the air conditioner coils.  Another fan was running that was turning a large fan blade blowing hot air down next to us.  We had brought our own fans to blow cooler air on us while we worked on the motor.  This particular motor weighed about 400 lbs, to give you an idea of the size of motor we were repairing.

A motor much like this one only mounted vertically

Charles and I had brought a temperature gun to check how hot everything was when we were working.

An Infrared Thermometer

When we checked the temperature, we found that the area where we had to stand was 160 degrees.  The motor itself was even hotter than that.  We had to wear leather gloves just to work on it without burning our hands.  Asbestos gloves would have rendered us useless because they make you feel like you are wearing “Hulk Hands” where your fingers are about 2 inches wide.

Asbestos Gloves worn when putting hot bearings on a motor shaft (for instance)

See what I mean?

Hulk Hands

The air was too hot to breathe except for quick shallow breaths.  Even though we had a fan blowing directly on us, we took turns approaching the motor, turning some bolts a couple of times, and then quickly moving out of the area to where we could be in the cooler 105 degree temperature.

There is nothing like a mild irritation (such as working in extreme heat) to motivate you to hurry up a job.  Charles and I worked diligently to remove the motor and then lowered it down with a platform hand lift that we kept in the shop.

A platform Lift Hand Truck like the one we used only ours had a hydraulic lift on it.  This one has a hand crank.

This fan motor was on the roof of a building, so once we had removed the motor from where it was mounted, we still had to lower it down to the back of the truck which was backed up to the side of the building.  Once in the truck, we brought it back to the plant where we could work on it.

When you first went to work in the oil refinery you had to take a specially designed safety course when you are issued your Nomex coat.  During that class, you are told that if you hear the sirens go off, that generally means that there are some toxic gases being released accidentally in the plant, you are supposed to take action quickly.

The funniest (or not so funniest) instructions was that when the sirens go off, you are supposed to run in the opposite direction away from the sirens.  Which sort of reminds me of Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail when they had to run away from the viscous fighting rabbit. Yelling “Run Away!  Run Away!”  Great safety evacuation plan.  — Plan of action:  “Run!!!”

Battling the Killer Rabbit in the Search for the Holy Grail

The toxic gas that everyone was worried about is called Hydrogen Sulfide or H2S.  This is the gas that smells like rotten eggs.  The only problem is that when there is more than the minimal amount of H2S in the air, you can’t smell it for more than a few seconds because it quickly deadens your sense of smell.

Hydrogen Sulfide Warning Sign

Another fun reason to not want to go work in the Oil Refinery.

Anyway, Charles and I safely reversed the process to return the motor to its rightful place mounted on the bottom of the coils on the roof.

A few times I had to go to work at the Co-Generation plant because something was broken (like the fan motor), but most of the time that we went to the plant was to do our quarterly battery inspections.  For more information about battery inspections, you can read this post: “Importance of Power Plant Backup Battery Preventative Maintenance“.

I have told you all the reasons why I didn’t enjoy working at the Oil Refinery in Ponca City, Oklahoma.  There were reasons why I did enjoy it.  I suppose if you have been reading my posts, you will know the most obvious answer to that question (oh.  I guess I didn’t really ask a question… but if I had…).  The only redeeming factor with working at the Co-Generation plant at the oil refinery was being able to work with the best Power Plant Men and Women in the country.

I have given you an example above when I worked with Charles Foster.  I also worked with Scott Hubbard and Diana Brien.

Scott Hubbard

My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien

Both of them top class electricians and First Class Friends.  Just to be able to work side-by-side with such terrific people made me forget about the poison gases.  I didn’t mind the heat.  I even forgot I was wearing the heavy suffocating Nomex Coat.  What’s a little grime when your friend tells you about their day?  About what they are planning for the weekend?  Or the rest of their life?

Actually, I think that’s what made everything about working both at the Oil Refinery and the Power Plant itself the most enjoyable job I can imagine.  Sure.  We had a culture of “cleanliness” at the plant but I think it was the culture of “friendliness” that really made all the difference.  It was also the most painful part the day I finally left the Power Plant to adventure out to find the rest of the world in 2001.

The 99th “Rest Of” Power Plant Post

Originally posted 7/25/2015

Many years ago in my earlier days as a Power Plant Electrician while working on Relays at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, Ben Davis, a plant electrician and True Power Man introduced me to one of his favorite Rock and Roll Bands, the “Dire Straits”.  One of their hit songs is “Money For Nothing.”  About 14 years later, the Power Plant Men learned exactly how to make “Money For Nothing” and other “Money Matters”!

Albert Einstein was once asked what the greatest miracle known to man is, and he replied “Compound Interest”.

Albert Einstein

One day at the Power Plant our timekeeper Linda Shiever invited a Financial Planner to come to the plant and talk to the Power Plant Men about the importance of planning ahead for your retirement.  This may have been the first time many of the Power Plant Men had ever heard of such a thing as “Compound Interest”.

Linda Shiever

To a Power Plant Man, “Compound Interest” sounds more like “paying close attention when you pound something with a sledge hammer”.

The Financial Planner explained to the Power Plant Men that it is important to begin planning for the future early in your life.  He gave us a sheet of paper titled “Put the Magic of compounding to work for you.”  It showed how someone 25 years old investing in the stock market (S&P 500 which averages 10% annually over time) by putting $2,000 in something that gives you a 10% return for 8 years, and then stops, while another person waits 8 years until they are 33 and spends the rest of their life putting $2,000 into the same stock market they will never have as much as the person who only put in $2000 for 8 years beginning when they were 25 years old.

Let me explain this a little more:  Using compound interest at 10% rate for his example (since that is what you receive in the S&P 500 over time), he showed that the person that invested $16,000 beginning at 25 years old and adding $2000 each year for only 8 years will have a net earnings of over $1,000,000 by the time they are 71 years old.  Yet the person that waited 8 years and invested $78,000 by adding $2,000 each year until they are 71 will only have a net earnings of $800,000.  The importance was that compound interest works best when you start early.

This is a great lesson to learn.  The problem was that the majority of the audience was already well over 40 years old.  There may have been one person in the room that was 25 years old, and that was only because they weren’t telling the truth about their age.

On Friday, September 6, 1996 a group of us from the plant were told to show up at a hotel conference room not far from corporate headquarters to attend a meeting that was called “Money Matters”.  The other phrase they used to describe the meeting was that it was a “Root Learning” class.  The reason it was called Root Learning was because the company that put the class together for the Electric Company was called Root Learning.

When we arrived, we were told which table we were going to sit.  Bruce Scambler was the leader of the table where I was appointed to sit.  When we were assigned seats, it was in a way that the Power Plant Men were spread out across the tables, so that we were each sitting with people from other departments in the company.  I supposed right away that this was so that we could maximize the spread of the Power Plant culture to others.

This turned out to be a class about how the company has problems that need to be resolved.  When the class began the leader placed a poster in the middle of the table.  It showed a picture of a canyon.  The workers were on one side and the leaders were on the other with the managers stuck in the middle.  It was very similar to this picture:

The Canyon Root Learning Map

This was an ingenious representation of the problems the company had with the management structure.  The poster we had was customized for our particular company.

We talked for a couple of hours about how we could bridge the gap between management and the workers.  What were some of the barriers in the tornado that kept destroying those bridges…. etc.

The following year on September 24, 1997, we attended another meeting in Enid Oklahoma where we learned about Shareholder value.  The leader of my table this year was a young man from HR at Corporate Headquarters (I’ll mention this guy in a later post).  This topic made more sense as it really did talk about Money this time.  This time the maps they showed us had race cars on it which showed the different competing electric companies.  Something like this:

The Shareholder learning map

Being the main electric company in the state, our truck was on the Regulated track. Some of the electric providers had figured out a way to go the unregulated route.  Our company kept looking for ways to get on the unregulated road by offering other services that were not regulated.  After looking at the poster that looked similar to the one above for a while and talking about it, we moved on to the next poster:

The second Shareholder Map

Even though the chart is the main part of this picture, most of the discussion took place around the “Expense Street” section in the picture.  There was an added pie chart that was on a card that was placed on this street which showed how the expenses of the company were broken down.

The main expense for the company was Fuel.  I want to say that it was close to 40% of expenses.  Taxes was the next largest expense for the company.  It made up somewhere around 30% of our total expenses.  The rest of the expenses were the other costs to run the company.  Employee wages made up around 8% of the total expenses for the company.

Employee wages was the smallest piece of the pie

It was the job of the leader at the table to explain that the cost for fuel was pretty well fixed, so we can’t do anything about that.  We also can’t do anything about how much taxes the company pays.  We didn’t have control over the supplies and other costs the company buys.  So, the bottom line was that the little sliver of expenses for the company that represented “Employee Wages” was really the only thing we can adjust to increase shareholder value…..

What?  Run that one by me again?  We were a 3 billion dollar revenue company.  We had around 3,000 employees which we had reduced to around 2,000 employees when the Corporation Commission cut how much we could charge for electricity, and now you’re saying that the only way to keep the company afloat is to “adjust” employee wages because 92% of everything else it “out-of-bounds”?  I think you can see why we spent a lot of time discussing this…  This turned into a pretty lively discussion.

Learning about the “Time Value of Money” can be very helpful.  I had a financial calculator that I kept at the plant.  One day one of the Power Plant Men came to me and asked me to figure out how they could buy a Harley Davidson Motorcycle.  Earl Frazier said that he could only afford something like $230 per month and the wanted to buy this motorcycle.  How would he do that?  The motorcycle cost something like $38,000 or more.   I don’t remember the exact details.

A Harley Davidson Motorcycle

Sounds complicated doesn’t it?  How does a Power Plant Man buy a Harley Davidson for only $230.00 per month with only a four year loan?  Earl had heard that I knew all about the “Time Value of Money” and that if there was a way, I would be able to tell him how to do it.  His parameters were that the cost of the motorcycle was $38,000 (I’m just guessing as I don’t remember the exact amounts), and he could only pay $230 each month.

Well.  Even with a no interest loan, it would take over 13 years to pay for the motorcycle.  So, my only option for solving this problem was to pull out my financial calculator:

My Texas Instrument BAII Plus Financial Calculator

This calculator allowed me to find the monthly payment quickly for a loan at a specific interest rate over a specific number of months.  So, I worked backward from that point.  I told Earl to come back in a couple of hours and I would let him know his options.

Earl Frazier

When Earl returned, I had his answer…. I told him this….  Each month he needed to begin putting his $230.00 into an annual CD at the bank for 5% (yeah… they had those at that time).  In two and a half years, he would stop doing that.  And just put his money in his regular checking account.  Then 9 months later, he takes the money in his checking account and buys the Harley Davidson.  This way he would put 10% down up front (because CDs would have been rolling into his account also).

Then, each month, as his CDs became available, he would roll part of them back into another year, leaving out a certain amount each time to supplement the $230.00 he would still be paying each month for his motorcycle, since his payments would be significantly higher than that.  Then exactly after 4 years, he would have used up all of the money in his account just as he would be paying off his motorcycle.  This would only work if he could get a loan for the motorcycle that charged 3.7% interest rate or less which was a reasonable rate at the time.

Earl responded by saying, “You mean I will have to wait 3 years before I can buy the motorcycle?!?!”  Yeah.  That was the bottom line… and by the end of it all, he would have to pay for the motorcycle over a 7 year period when it came down to it.    He wasn’t too happy about having to wait, but that was the only way he could do it for $230 monthly payments.

Here is a side story…  A few years later when I went to work for Dell, we also had Root Learning classes there as well.  Here is one of the posters we used during the class:

In this picture, Dell is the big boat at the top.  When I walked into the class I recognized the style of the poster right off the bat.  Oh!  Root Learning!  This will be fun.  These types of classes were a fun way to express the realities of the business and the obstacles they have to overcome to achieve their goals.

I still remember the leader at our table 13 years later.  His name is Jonah Vaught.  I worked with him about 5 years after that class.  I acted like I knew him, and I could tell that he was wondering where we had met.  So, I finally told him…. “You were the group leader when we were doing that Money Matters class back in 2002.”

End of Side story….

Now when I listen to the Dire Straits’ song “Money For Nothing” (like Paul Harvey’s “Rest of the Story”) you know what goes through my mind…   First sitting in the switchgear working on relays with Ben Davis listening to Rock and Roll on the radio (see the post:  “Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis“).

Secondly, I remember the Power Plant Men learning the “Time Value of Money” in a fun way that kept them interested.

Thirdly, I remember Charles Lay finally realizing when he was 63 years old that he was going to have to work the rest of his life because he hadn’t been saving for retirement…. See the post “Pain in the Neck Muskogee Power Plant Relay Testing“). Some times when you learn about the Time Value of Money…. it’s too late to do anything about it because time has already run out.

The 98th “Rest Of” Power Plant Post

Originally posted 7/4/2015

When I first became an electrician at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, my foreman Charles Foster and I would sit each day at lunch and talk about movies we had seen.  We would go into detail explaining each scene to each other so that when I actually watched a movie that Charles had described, I felt as if I had seen it already.  In the years that followed, after we had described to each other just about every movie we could remember, we moved on to playing games.

Charles Foster

Sure, there were those jokes we would play now and then, but I’m not talking about those.  This was something different.  One of the games that we played was Chess.

I brought a computerized chessboard to work one day that had pieces on a board that you pressed down when you wanted to move a piece, then you moved it and pressed down on the square where you placed the piece in order for the board to keep track where all the pieces were on the board.

The actual Computerized Chessboard we used

This chessboard had 8 levels of difficulty when you played against the computer. Charles, Terry Blevins, Scott Hubbard and I were not really the competitive type. We were more of the team player types. So, when we played, we played against the computer as a team.

We would set the level of difficulty to the highest level, then as a team, we would spend a long time analyzing our moves. Sometimes we would discuss making our next move over several days. Actually, at the highest level, the computer would at times take up to 7 hours to decide what move to make. — This was when computers were still relatively slow.

We figured out that at level 8, the chessboard would think of all the possibilities for the next 8 moves. Once we realized that, then we knew that we had to think 9 moves ahead in order to beat it. So, you could see how together we would try several strategies that would put us ahead after we had basically forced the computer to make 9 moves… It wasn’t easy, but by realizing what we were dealing with, we were able to beat the chess computer on the highest level.

The game where we beat the computer on the highest level took us over 3 months to play and 72 turns.  The four of us had teamed up against the computer in order to beat it. I remember that I would wake up in the morning dreaming about that game of chess when we were playing it and I would be anxious to go into the electric shop to try out a move that had popped in my mind when I was in the shower.

Once we were able to beat the chess board we went on to other things.

Diana Brien (my first and only “Bucket Buddy”) and I would buy Crossword puzzle magazines and when we were in a spot where we were waiting for an operator to arrive, or for a pump to finish pumping, etc.

My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien

We would pull out the crossword puzzle magazine and start working on them.  If we weren’t doing crossword puzzles, we were doing Word Searches, or Cryptograms… more on them in a moment.

Crossword Puzzle Book – mainstay in Power Plant Tool Buckets

This kept our mine sharp, and just as Fat Albert and Cosby Kids used to say, “If you’re not careful, you might learn something before you’re through.”

I had bought some Crossword puzzles that had other types of puzzles in them.  Some were pretty straightforward like Cryptograms.  That is where you have a phrase where each letter of the alphabet has been changed to another letter of the alphabet, and you have to figure out what it says.  So, for instance, an “A” may have been changed to a “D” and a “B” to a “Z” etc.  So, you end up with a sentence or two that looks like gibberish, but it actually means something once you solve the puzzle.

An example of a cryptogram magazine

The cryptogram magazine I copied for the picture isn’t complete because of the green rectangle is blocking out part of it, but I can see that it says:  “Everyone wants to “understand” art.  Why not try to understand the song of a bird?  (Pablo Picasso).”

We were becoming expert cryptogram puzzle solvers, when one day we ran into a short cryptogram that didn’t have many words.  We tried solving this cryptogram for almost a week.  Scott Hubbard was getting frustrated with me, because I would never give up and look at the answer in the back of the book.  So, after he became so fed up with me, he finally looked in the back of the book and wrote the answer in the puzzle.  The answer was this:  “Red breasted Robin, Harbinger of Spring”

Now… how is someone supposed to figure out a puzzle like that?  I had figured on the “ing” in Spring and Harbinger but since Harbinger was barely in my vocabulary to begin with, I was never going to solve this one… I’ll have to admit.

Regardless, I was upset with Scott for looking at the answer in the back of the magazine, so I ripped out all the answers from the magazine and threw them in the dumpster so we would never be able to look at them again….. Still…. I would probably be trying to figure out “Red breasted Robin, Harbinger of Spring” to this day if Scott Hubbard hadn’t looked in the back of the book.  I just felt like I wasn’t getting my money’s worth if we looked at the answers…. Yeah.  all $3.95 worth (pretty cheap entertainment).

Scott Hubbard

So, I have a side story to go along with working Cryptograms….

In my later life I changed jobs and went to work at Dell in Texas.  (It just so happened that the Puzzle Books we would buy were usually “Dell” puzzle books…. totally unrelated to the Dell Computer company where I worked).  That’s not really the important part of the side story, but I thought I would throw that in for good measure.

Every so often, our department would have an offsite where some team building events were held in order to… well… build teams.

One particular team building event was held in a park in Round Rock Texas where we were assigned to teams and each team was assigned to their own picnic table.  When the game began we were each given a poster board with some phrase on it… and guess what?  It was a cryptogram!

I was the only person on my team that knew how cryptograms worked, though most had seen them in the newspaper below the crossword puzzle, no one on our team had ever tried solving them.  As a team, we were supposed to solve the puzzle.  The quote was fairly long, which made it easy for someone who had been obsessed with cryptograms for years…. — Myself.

I took one look at the puzzle and said…. “That word right there is “that” and I wrote in the word “that”.  Then I began filling in all the letters that had “T”, “H” and “A”.  I quickly found a couple of “The”s which gave me the “E”, then I had one three letter word that began with an “A” and ended with an “E” that could only be the word “Are”.  Which gave me the letter “R”.  I could see that there were a couple of places that ended in “ing”, so I quickly filled those in, and as quickly as we could write all the letters into the puzzle we were done.

My director, Diane Keating, happened to be on my team.  When I first pointed to the word “That” and said, “That is the word ‘that'”, she said, “Wait, how can you tell?”  I said, “Trust me.  I know Cryptograms.”  When we had finished the puzzle within about a minute and a half, we called the person over to check it and she was amazed that we had solved the puzzle so quickly.

That is the end of the side story, except to say that I give credit to the games that Power Plant Men Play for teaching me the fine art of solving Cryptograms.  Our team came in first place…. needless to say after solving three cryptograms in a row.

There were other more complicated but equally fun types of anagram/cryptogram combination puzzles that I worked when we had worked all the cryptogram puzzles in the Dell Variety Magazines.  Eventually Charles Foster and I were looking for something different.  That was when Charles ordered a subscription to a magazine called “GAMES”.

Games Magazines used by Power Plant Men

This was a monthly magazine that was full of all sorts of new games.  Today, I understand that this magazine is more about the Video Games that are out than puzzle sort of games.  Each month we would scour the pages of the Game magazine looking for puzzles to conquer.  We worked on those for about a year.

At one point in my days as an electrician, I wrote a Battleship game for my Sharp Calculator that was a two player game.  We each had a battleship in a 100 x 100 grid, which you could move around.  It was sort of like the Battleship game where on the commercial they would say, “You Sunk My Battleship!”  Only, our ships could move and we only had one.

Not the battleship game played by Power Plant Men

Each turn when you would plug in the coordinates to shoot at the other person’s ship, it would only tell you how much you missed by.  Then you could plot it on a graph paper and try to figure out where the other person’s ship was.  Even though it could move.  If you were close, then it would damage the other ship, and it would slow down so it couldn’t move as fast.

A Sharp Calculator like I used to program the Battleship game

When the next person took their turn, they could see if their ship had been damaged or sunk, or even had become dead in the water….

The person was randomly assigned a home base at the beginning of the game and they could go there to repair their ship and be given more ammo in case they were running low.  If they did this more than twice, then the other guy would know because the circles they would draw on their graph paper would keep intersecting at that one point.

Anyway…. that was the calculator game I made that I played with Terry Blevins for a while.

Terry Blevins

While other Power Plant Men were playing “Rope the Bull” with an Iron rendition of a bull welders had created, some of us in the electric shop were playing different kinds of games.  Puzzles.

I think the reason that electricians like puzzles so much is because a lot of what they do from day-to-day is solve puzzles.  When something isn’t functioning and the electrician has to figure out why, they usually have to follow through a bunch of steps in order to figure out what exactly went wrong.  Solving Circuit problems are a lot like the puzzles we were playing.

Sometimes they are like “Word Searches” where you are looking for needles in the haystacks.  Sometimes they are like Cryptograms where a circuit has been wired incorrectly and you have to figure out which wire is supposed to go where.  Sometimes you get so frustrated that you just wish you could look in the back of the book at the answer page.  In real life, you don’t always have an answer page exactly.

Some of us may think that you can find all you need to know in the Bible, but there are different kinds of “Bibles” for different kinds of jobs.  In the Electric Shop we had the National Electric Code.  We had the Master Blueprints that showed us how things were supposed to be wired up.  Some times we just had to wing it and try putting words in crossword puzzle that we knew might not be the right ones, but they were the best we had at the time.

I’m just glad that I spent that time working puzzles with my friends at the Power Plant.  If solving puzzles together helps build a team, then we had the best darn team around!

Because someone asked me about the game we played against the computer… Here is the play by play (for those who know how to read Chess Playing Geek Language):

The 94th “Rest Of” Power Plant Post

Originally posted 4/25/2015

Power Plant Men cherish few things more than Friday afternoon when they head out to the parking lot and the weekend officially begins.  Coolers full of ice, a quick trip to the convenience store for some beer and they are ready for the next two days.  That’s why when a suggestion was made that the Power Plant Men might have to start working on Saturdays as well, the idea was not well received.

The Maintenance Department at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma had downsized from 13 crews to 4 teams.  We were struggling to figure out how to make that work.  We had four teams and only seven electricians.  Which meant that one team had only one electrician.  Diane Brien was the lucky “one”.  She was the only electrician on her team.

My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien

We were spread out so far already, how could we possibly cover an extra day of the week?  Who (besides operators – who work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) would want to give up their Saturday to work straight time at the Power Plant.  I mean…. we all loved our jobs (for the most part), but this was asking a lot.

We had learned from the last two downsizings and the the Quality Process that when the company hired consultants, things were going to change.  We were convinced that consultants were hired to take the heat off of upper management.  They could just say, “Well…. This is what the Consultants told us would work best, so we’re cutting our staff in half.”

So, when consultants were hired for over $100,000 to figure out how we could work an “alternate work schedule”, we were suspicious.  Any of us could sit around and put two and two together to figure out a way to work alternate work schedules.  This led us to believe that this was another attempt to force us into something by saying, “The Consultants….. (not us)….”  Bringing to mind the phrase from Star Wars, Return of the Jedi; “Many Bothans Died for This Information.”

Caroline Blakiston as Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi

Picture this lady telling the Power Plant Men how they were going to work on Saturdays and they were going to like it.  The phrase “T’ain’t No Way!” comes to mind.  Here is how the meeting went….

We were called to the main break room, which doubled as the main conference room, and tripled as the Men’s Club Gathering Sanctuary.  The consultants were introduced to a room of silent, glaring, suspicious Power Plant Men types.  We were told that they had been working on alternate work schedules that we might possibly want to consider.  No matter what, they were not going to force anything on us.  We were told that we would only go on an alternate work schedule if we voted and the majority were okay with it.

Power Plant Men chins began to jut out in defiance.  The rattle of someone’s dentures came from the back of the room.  A nearly unanimous vote of “No” was already decided by about 90% of the people going by the the body language of the men in the room.

I’m sure you know the look (image found on Google)

The consultants continued by saying that they had three alternatives that they would like to run by us.  The first one was to provide coverage 7 days of the week.  I think everyone in the room knew that there were only 7 days in a week, and this meant that they wanted the four maintenance crews to work every day of the week.  Including Sundays, since we figured that Sunday must be included in the 7 days, since we couldn’t think of 7 days without including Sundays.

Currently, Sundays were double time.  If Sunday became a regular work day, then the only double time would be during the night.  You can see the reason why management wanted to increase our regular coverage to the weekend.  It would eliminate a large amount of overtime.  This isn’t a bad idea when you are trying to figure out how to save money.

The consultants (I’m probably going to begin a lot of paragraphs with the words… The consultants… for obvious reasons) said that the benefit of working on Sundays was that every 4 weeks we would get 6 days off of work in a row!  What?  How does that work?  They showed us how it worked, but the majority was not in favor of working Sundays.

I personally thought that if we had to work on Sundays, then I was probably going to be looking for a new job some place else.  I knew operators did this, but this was something that they had accepted up front when they became operators.  Operators are a special breed of workers that dedicate their lives to the plant.  Maintenance crews, though they are equally loyal, are not willing to give up a regular work habit.  Even though I worked Sundays when an emergency came up without question, this day was normally reserved for going to Church and spending the day at home with my family.  So, this was never going to be a long term option for me.

The options to work on Sundays meant that there was only one day each week (Thursday) when all four of the teams would be working on the same day.  That would be the day when we would have plant-wide meetings, like the Monthly (or had it moved to Quarterly) Safety meetings.

There were two options that included Sundays.  Neither of them were acceptable to the Power Plant Men.  The third option was to cover Saturday.  The consultants showed us how we could cover Saturday as a normal work day and every four weeks we could have 5 days off in a row.  How is it, you ask, can you cover one extra day and you have more days off?

The Consultant’s answer:  Work 4-10s (four tens).  That is, work four ten hour days each week.  When you work ten hour days for four days, you still work the same 40 hours each week, only you have to show up at the plant for four days instead of 5.  This means, you have one extra day each week where you don’t even have to go to work.

Think about this… We normally arrived at the plant at 8:00 and left at 4:30 (8 hour day with a 30 minute lunch).  We were being asked to come in at 7:00 and leave at 5:30.  Two extra hours each day and you only have to work 4 days.  The company will not only be covering a Saturday now, but they would be covering 10 hours each day instead of just 8.  The dentures rattled again in the back of the room, only this time it was Bill Green’s (our plant manager)…. he was salivating at the prospect of covering an extra 20 hours each week (2 extra hours each week day and 10 hours on Saturday) by just shuffling around the work schedule.  That’s 50% more coverage!

Think about this some more…..  I only had to do laundry for four days of coal and fly ash soaked clothes instead of five.  I only had to drive the 25 miles to the plant and the 25 miles back, four times each week instead of five.  That reduces my gas by 20%.  It also gives me an extra hour each week when I don’t have to drive to and from work…  this comes out to 48 extra hours free each year (after subtracting vacation) for just not having to drive to work five times each week.  More than an extra week’s worth of vacation. saved in driving time alone.  I’ll tell you some more benefits after I show you how this worked….

The consultants explained the 4 – 10s covering a Saturday with four crews like this…..  We worked on a four week cycle.  Each week, each team was on a different week in the cycle.  We all worked on Wednesday and Thursday.  The rest of the days, there were less than 4 teams working… it worked like this….

If you are working on week 3 (Monday thru Thursday), after Thursday you don’t go back to work until next Wednesday!  Five days off in a row without using any vacation!

Crazy huh?  The only catch was that you had to work on a Saturday once every four weeks.  But think about this…. (I seem to enjoy saying that in this post…. “think about this…”)  I think it’s because the first thought is that this is dumb.  Why would I want to work two extra hours each day?  Why would I want to give up one of my Saturdays?  Ok… while you’re thinking about that, I’ll move on to the next paragraph…

 I suppose you realized by now that there are 13 Saturdays that each person would work in a 52 week year when you work a Saturday once every four weeks.  Thinking about it that way isn’t so bad.  Especially since the Power Plant Men had at least four weeks vacation (160 hours) by this time since the majority of the Power plant Men had been there for at least 10 years.  Those with 20 years had 5 weeks vacation (200 hours).  My fellow electrician Charles Foster said that to me as we were going back to work…. “I can just take vacation every time we have to work on Saturday.”  — We’ll see….

Charles Foster

With 10 hour days, that meant that if you have 4 weeks vacation, then you have 16 days off.  You could take your Saturday off for vacation for the entire year, giving you a three day weekend instead of two days off in a row every 4 weeks using only 10 hours of vacation, and you can avoid having to work any Saturdays (if that’s really what you want).

The Power Plant Men decided to give it a try to see how we liked it for a few months.  The majority of us had mixed feelings about this new work schedule.  The other thought in our mind was, “We paid over $100,000 for someone to come up with this?  Maybe we’re in the wrong line of work.”

One problem with this plan is that we had to have an alternate carpooling schedule.  Scott Hubbard and Fred Turner and I were not all on the same teams.  So, we had to figure out when we were working on the same days and try to remember who drove the last time we had that particular configuration of carpoolers in order to figure out whose turn it was to drive.  We figured something out that seemed to work… there were just a few times when the neighbors would hear… “No, it’s my turn!  No!  It’s mine!  Remember last Friday?  But that was you and Scott!  No!  I have it right here in my notes!  Fred drove, we talked about Deer Stands and types of feeders. I nodded my head a lot.”

A Deer and a raccoon fighting over who gets first dibs on the deer feeder. My money is on the raccoon.

The first Saturday Charles Foster and I showed up to work, we noticed a great benefit right away.  Our team was the only team working in the Maintenance Shop.  That meant that we had all the trucks to ourselves!  No fighting over truck keys!  We didn’t have to wait in line at the tool room.  No waiting around for Clearances on the equipment.  We had full reign over the shop.  We also had Sue Schritter go to Ponca City to pick up parts shortly before lunch so that she could bring back Pizza for us! (ok.  yes.  we were bribed with Pizza) Courtesy of our foreman, Alan Kramer:

Alan Kramer

oh.  almost forgot the picture of the pizza:

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

We really enjoyed working on Saturday.  It turned out to be the best day to work.  No management stalk… um… walking around watching us from around corners….  No meetings…  Just working away without interruption.  We would complete a lot of work on Saturdays.

Another benefit that I don’t think was expected was a big reduction in Sick Leave.  I no longer had to take off time to go to the doctor or the dentist.  I now had days off during the week, so I would just schedule doctor appointments when I was not working.

Holidays were handled two ways.  You still only had 8 hours off for a holiday instead of 10, so you had to work around that.  When there was a holiday, you could either work four 8 hour days (instead of 10) that week and take off the holiday just as you normally would, or you could take off 8 hours just on the holiday, and either use 2 hours of vacation or come into work for 2 hours (2 hours vacation made the most sense since you wouldn’t want to drive that far to work for just 2 hours).

When it was all said and done, the Power Plant Men stayed on 4-10s working every fourth Saturday at our plant.  Other plants were able to decide on their own work schedules.  I know one of the other plants decided they didn’t want to change.  They still liked driving to work five days each week instead of four.  They liked cleaning five days worth of dirty clothes each week instead of four.  They liked having two days off each week instead of an average of three days.  Maybe they didn’t know what they liked.

This brings to mind a book that I read once after reading another book recommended by Toby O’Brien.  Toby gave me a book once called “One Minute Manager”.

One Minutes Manager. a book about How not to micro-manage

One of the authors wrote another book called, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson, M.D.  I encourage everyone to read this:

A book about resistance to change

Reading books like these are a lot cheaper than hiring a consultant for boo-coos just to make changes.  You just have “Power Plant Reading Time” during the morning meeting and read a chapter from this little book.

The 93rd “Rest Of” Power Plant Post

Originally posted 4/11/2015

I began writing this blog more than three years ago in order to share some of the stories about the great Power Plant Men and Women that I was privileged to work with for twenty years at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.  I have put the men and women of this plant on a well-deserved pedestal.  Don’t just take my word for it.  The rest of the world had their eyes fixed on our plant.  Of the 700 Coal-fired Power Plants operating in the United States, there was one that stood out above all the rest.  It was no wonder to me.

The Power Plant had been told that in 1995 our plant had the lowest operating and maintenance cost of any fossil fueled Power Plant in the United States.  This included the cost for the fuel, which was coal being transported from Wyoming on trains.  The second lowest operating Power Plant was our sister plant in Muskogee.  After that was a plant in Texas that happened to sit on coal mine, and didn’t have the cost of shipping their coal 1,000 miles before they burned it.

The company was so proud of our achievements that they gave each of us a Jean Jacket with our names embroidered on it.  On the upper right it said, “1995 Low Cost Award”.

1995 Low Cost Award Jean Jacket

I don’t do Selfies, that’s why I draped this over a chair.

A couple of years later, we were again awarded as the low cost provider of electricity in the country.  This time they gave us Denim shirts.  Okies like Denim… I guess you could tell.  The cuff on the sleeve says, “1997  Sooner Power Plant Model Of Cost Efficiency”.

Denim Shirt awarded for being the 1997 “Model of Cost Efficiency”

In the spring of 1998 (someone can correct me on the year), a plant manager, Mark Draper from England came to our plant to study us.  He wanted to see how a group of 124 employees could run a plant the size of a small city as efficiently as we did.  Throughout the year he worked on various teams to see how we operated.  He wanted to learn our secret.  The plant was willing to share everything with Mark.

Mark Draper

Mark would spend a month working as a welder, then another month working as an Instrument and Controls Technician, then another in the machine shop.  He continued throughout the year bouncing from job to job watching and learning.  He spent a lot of time working with the Engineers.  I kept waiting for him to work as an electrician.

I had our second biggest secret just waiting to show to Mark, but it seems that it never occurred to Mark that electricians had something to offer to the efficiency of the Power Plant.  Because during the twelve months Mark spent at our plant, he never worked as an electrician.

The first biggest secret came in the form of an Engineer named Larry Kuennen.  He had studied the way the coal burned in the boiler and had come up with ways to increase the efficiency.  I’m sure Mark learned a lot from working with Larry.

I kept itching for the day that Mark Draper ended up working out of the electric shop.  I was going to take him on a tour and show him how we were saving a huge amount of electricity at our plant in a way that is totally overlooked by everyone else.  Without this secret, there would be no way we would have been the low cost provider of electricity.  I think at the time our plant could create electricity at a rate around 1.5 cents per killowatthour (someone at the plant can correct me.  It has been a while and I may be confusing this with the percent cost of IT by revenue at Dell).

Before I tell you about the report that Mark Draper gave us at the end of his year of studying the heman habits of Oklahoma Power Plant Men, let me expand on the way the electricians had increased the efficiency of the power plant.  It has to do with what a foreman, Mark Fielder would refer to as “My Baby.”  The precipitator.

Mark Fielder

The Precipitator is the piece of equipment that uses more power than just about everything else at the plant combined.  It takes the ash out of the exhaust before it goes out of the smoke stack.  That is why you don’t see smoke coming out of the smoke stack on a coal-fired Power Plant when it’s running.  When a precipitator is running efficiently, it should be able to take out 99.97% of the ash from the exhaust from the boiler.

The amount of ash going out of the smoke stack is measured by opacity.  That is, how much do the particles in the exhaust block a ray of light shining across the stack.  We tried to keep the opacity below 5%.  I think we legally had to keep it below 20%, but anything above 8% didn’t look good when you drove by the plant.  You would be able to see the smoke.

The precipitator at our plant used Static electricity to collect the ash.  Like I said, it used a lot of electricity.  Megawatts of power.  The secret is that Static electricity shouldn’t use much power.  Practically none.  If you calculated the work that actually had to be done, it was miniscule compared to running a conveyor or a big fan or a bowl mill.  This meant that 90% or more of the electricity used by an Electrostatic precipitator is wasted energy.  It is leaking, and in many cases actually working against collecting the ash.  A fine tuned electrostatic precipitator shouldn’t use much electricity.

The plant has a similar electrostatic precipitator, only ours is twice as long

We had found a number of ways at our plant to manipulate the electric pulse used to charge the plates in the precipitator in order to reduce the wasted electricity.  When everything ran correctly, when the unit was at full load (510 Megawatts), the precipitator could have an opacity close to 0% using less than 100 Kilowatts (yes.  I said Kilowatts) of power.  This was so unheard of that the company that manufactured our controls refused to believe it even when they were standing in the Precipitator Control Room watching it operate.

To put this in perspective.  One winter day, while I was tuning the precipitator, the space heaters in the Precipitator control room was using more power to heat the room than the entire precipitator was using to remove the ash at full load.  The opacity was almost 0%.

Another side story about this is that at one point, the opacity monitor was measuring a negative 0.2%.  Tony Mena, the Instrument and Controls Technician worked on calibrating the monitor.  He would take it to the logic room and set it up on some stands there that had the same measurements as the stack.  No matter how many times he calibrated the monitor, he was still coming out with -.1 or -.2% when he hooked it up to the smoke stack.  The final conclusion was that the precipitator was operating so efficiently that the exhaust going out of the smoke stack was cleaner than the ambient air.  — I know… I know… impossible… right?

I’ll admit, it wasn’t just the manipulation of the electric pulse, it was also sensitive to the temperature of the exhaust and the amount of sulfur in the coal.  We burned Wyoming coal which has a very low amount of sulfur.  This made it more challenging.

I couldn’t wait to show this to Mark Draper, the UK Plant Manager.  This was my baby, and I was proud of it.  Only, Mark never showed up.

One day I saw a man with a clipboard walking around the precipitator hoppers writing something down as he studied them.  So, I walked up to him.  I could tell right away that he was someone from England that had come as part of Mark Draper’s crew of spectators.  I asked him if he was interested in learning how we ran our precipitators.

I thought, maybe this is someone who is finally interested in how we save tons of money in operating cost each year by not wasting it on the precipitator.  He was an engineer taking notes on our ash transport system.  He wasn’t interested in how we operated the controls.  He said in England they just throw the switch and power up the precipitator to full power and let it go at that.  — A total waste of power and it’s less efficient.  I couldn’t even convince him to take a walk through the control cabinets just to see the voltage and amp meters.

Oh well, I thought…  This would just be our plant’s little secret.  No one else seems to want to know about it.

At the end of the year during our monthly safety meeting, Mark Draper gave us a report of his findings.  He went through a lot of bullet points in a PowerPoint Presentation. — Yeah.  We were beginning to get fancy with the computers around that time.

The first thing that Mark brought up was this…. He said that there was no way he was going to be able to go back to England and repeat what he had learned here.  The reason was that the Fine Power Plant Men and Women at our plant came to work each day and began working at 8:00.  They took close to a 20 minute break in the morning and in the afternoon.  They took a 40 minute lunch (Breaks were technically 15 minutes and lunch was 30, but…. you know how it is… you have to stretch them a little).  He explained that at our plant, we had about 6 and a half hours each day of productive time.  6-1/2 hours of actually working on something.

In England, this was impossible.  When the workers arrived at the plant in England, they took a long time getting ready for work.  They took longer breaks and longer lunches, and at the end of the day, they would take a long time to take a shower and clean up.  Almost an hour to clean up at the end of the day.  In England they were lucky when they were able to get 4 hours of actual work out of their workers.  Because of union agreements and such, they were helpless to change this culture.

Mark was impressed at the amount of pride people took doing their jobs.  I will paraphrase what Mark told us:  He could tell that the Oklahoma Power Plant Men and Women wanted to do a good job.  They received satisfaction by applying their skills to their work.  In England, the attitude of the worker was more like this was just a job.  Their real satisfaction in life was when they left the plant.  In Oklahoma, when the Power Plant Men left the plant, they left with more of a feeling of pride over doing a good job.

Mark did offer us some advice on how we could better ourselves.  He did give us his honest opinion about some things that he thought we might do better.  They sounded more like they were coming from his Plant Manager training than from his experience at our plant.

As Mark never did work with the electricians, I was never able to work with him.  Others who did, found Mark to be very friendly.  I know that some also kept in touch with him long after he left to go back to England.  I missed the opportunity to befriend Mark.  I wish I had.

Mark Draper must have had a tremendous amount of character to be able to persuade those in England that he should take off an entire year to go work at a Power Plant in Oklahoma U.S.A.. Just think of the commitment he was making to leave his home for a year to go work alongside skilled labor in another country.

I didn’t know Mark personally like a lot of the other Power Plant Men did, but after I originally posted this post (yesterday), a Control Room Operator, Jim Cave who knew Mark better told these stories to me:

• Mark told me that he wanted to live a normal American life while in the states. Bill Green had bought him a gift of an outdoor grill. The first opportunity that he had to use it he told me that he grilled the family some burgers and then they all went and sat in the car and ate them!
•  He also went and bought some American jeans so he would blend in with the workers. He caught all kinds of grief from the guys when they noticed his jeans didn’t have any back pockets! His wife had to go back to the store and buy him some “guy” pants.
•  He WAS a very nice and very smart guy. The cultural differences were interesting. He came into the control room one day asking me for “a pair of steps”. We had no idea that he wanted a ladder.

Mark did make sense when he said that what he saw at our plant he would not be able to reproduce in England.  The truth was that what Mark saw at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma was something that few plants in the United States could reproduce.  I have been attempting to make this point each week for the past 3 years.

There was something very special at this Power Plant during the 20 years when I worked there.  Something you are not going to find just anywhere.  The plant housed a collection of some of the most fantastic minds and personalities on the planet.  They had somehow all come together to perform a team that not only produced the “Model of Cost Efficiency” as it said on our shirts, but had also created a group of extraordinary teamwork.

Whenever I sat in a meeting like the Monthly Safety Meeting, where the entire maintenance department was present, as I looked around the room, I honestly could see that for the most part we were more of a family than we were employees.  I was lucky to have been invited to be a part of this family.  Kudos to you all.