After I left the power plant and went to work for Dell on August 20, 2001, I wrote letters back to my friends at the plant letting them know how things were going. This is the fifty sixth letter I wrote.
10/25/02 – Programmers in a Dell Cubicle
Dear friends from the “Northern Plains”,
Well. I hope everything is going well with all of you. We have been having rain here all week. It’s supposed to rain all weekend and then rain all next week, so I have been getting the feeling that I am living in Seattle, instead of Austin.
You would think it would be fairly dry in Austin, (except maybe for an occasional hurricane or something). Anyway. For those of you who don’t read this until Monday morning — I hope you turned your clock back. After all….. This is the weekend where we get to sleep for one more hour.
This week I started moving people into my cubicle to work on a project with them. I thought, just for fun, we would see how many people we could cram into one little cubicle with their computers all working away. We could only get 4 chairs and 5 computers in here at one time.
It was a neat experiment, and some people were falling out into the aisle. — But you should have seen the great team-building efforts that were going on. I had everyone’s name tag (which are made out of magnets), all stuck on my cubicle. — Well. It’s Friday afternoon, and everyone has left, so I have pushed out two of the chairs, and made some room so that I can stretch out and relax while I write this letter to you guys.
Oh, by the way. I have recently become an Excel Programming Expert. I can now write programs that can do all sorts of stuff with Excel Spreadsheets. — No. Not just the normal “Macro” stuff. I mean the real “Programming” stuff.
This one project that I’m working on pulls data from another application, and does a bunch of calculations on it, and sticks them into different Excel Spreadsheets. Then it takes information from other Excel Sheets and puts them in there as well. So, I told one guy that has been working on that project with me that we should write a book about programming for Excel (“The Real” stuff). Because a lot of this stuff isn’t documented anywhere and there isn’t really a place to go to learn how to do this. — It has been fun….. Of course.
On Monday we’re supposed to dress up in a Halloween costume, and have a party after lunch. I’m not sure what I should dress up as. — No, wait. I know. How about if I put on some steel-toed boots, and wear some dirty old jeans, and a grungy tee-shirt, and put on a scratched up old hardhat and carry a 5 gallon tool bucket and go as an “Electrician From Hell!!!!!” That should most certainly be scary!!!!
The only problem with that, is that I might get dirty. I’m sure you guys already know that I don’t like to get dirty. That’s why I took this job…. Remember.
Anyway. All is going well with my family. We are all waiting for the Dove to return with an olive branch so that we know it will be safe to go outside again after the waters recede. I’ll write to you guys later. Let me know how things are going.
Your Friendly Dell Programmer,
Kevin James Anthony Breazile
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Kevin J. Breazile
CIA: Customer Experience, Integrated Services Model, and Ariba
–CIA, we work behind the scenes so you don’t have to–
Dell Computer Corporation
(512) 728-1527
Power Plant Men 