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 eighty third letter I wrote.
9/2/03 – Dell Programmer in Training
Dear Sooner Plantonians,
I hope everything is going well with you guys. I was in training last week in Kansas City, and this week I’m in Dallas for the rest of the week. My manager told me that he never saw one person have as much training as I have had in the past 7 months. Let’s see. Just to give you an idea, here is a list of the training I have had since February:
ASP.Net programming
MBA Course: Economics of Management
Answer First Presentations
Memory Improvement Seminar (I don’t quite remember what that was about).
Training Seminar on Microsoft Project 2002 and Visio 2002
Business Acumen
Financial Acumen
Programming in C#
Mentoring Awareness for I/T
Finance for Professionals
Winning with Integrity
MBA Course: Ethical and Legal Environment of Business
Business Process Improvement Yellow Belt Training
Requirements Management with Use Cases
Work/Life Effectiveness
Advanced D3 Training (Data Warehouse Reporting Tool)
Managing Your Performance For Individual Contributors
Oracle Database High Availability
Project Office Express Training
Software Configuration Management Process Overview
DevPartner Studio training
MBA Course: Financial Decision-making
Then there are the courses that I took last Week. These are all Kronos Application courses:
Daily Operations
Pay Period
Scheduling
Setup and Administration
Then the course that I am taking this week:
Kronos Connect Basic Interface Programming
Those are all the courses I have taken since February.
So what are these guys at Dell trying to tell me? Either that I’m important enough to send to every training course that comes along, or that they are trying to find something that I’m good at, so they keep sending me to training until I finally learn something. I think they might change my job title to “Professional Trainee”. – Or “Perpetual Trainee”.
So. The big news is what happened last week when I was in Kansas City. I ran into my best friend from High School. Some of you may remember me talking about him before. His name is Jesse Cheng.
For those of you who know the stories, This is the same Jesse in the phrase “Jesse! Come get your Chili!!!” Yeah. He’s my very smart friend who has his Engineering degree from Yale, his Medical Degree from Missouri University and his Masters in Public Health from Harvard. So needless to say, I spent all my spare time last week catching up with my old friend. I hadn’t seen him for 16 years. He lives only 7 miles from where I was going to training. Isn’t that a neat coincidence?
It’s also a neat coincidence that Jesse picked a barbecue place to go eat dinner named Fiorelli’s Jack Stack Barbecue. Why is that neat? Well. When I talked to my mom about it, she told me that the restaurant is owned by her cousin Carmen Fernano’s brother Jack Fiorelli!
I thought the Barbecue tasted familiar. I used to eat there when I was a kid. It’s better than KC Masterpiece which was in the same parking lot as the hotel where I was staying. Isn’t that a neat coincidence?
Well. Now I’m in Dallas and there is no “neat coincidences” here. Unless you think that it’s a neat coincidence that the traffic in Dallas is almost as bad as it is in Austin.
Or maybe it’s a neat coincidence that the last time I was in Dallas for training was when I came here for Advanced Protective Relay Training and one of the guys in our class (Randy Loesing) was from my High School class back in Columbia Missouri (the same High School where Jesse Cheng went), and now there has been a major blackout back in the east where this guy was working (Well, not exactly where he was working), and the root cause of the blackout has to be because the protective relays didn’t operate properly. — A neat coincidence? Or have I just entered “The Twilight Zone? Bee Boo Bee Boo…..
Note to Reader: For more information about running into someone during protective relay training and the blackout back east, read these two posts: Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis and Pain in the Neck Muskogee Power Plant Relay Testing.
Well. I guess this letter has rambled on long enough and strange enough. So I will end it here. Keep in touch.
Your friendly Dell Programmer in Training,
Kevin James Anthony Breazile
______________________
Kevin J. Breazile
Programmer/Analyst III
Dell Inc.
(512) 728-1527
Power Plant Men 