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 fourth letter I wrote.
9/12/03 – Dilbert In a Dell Shirt
Dear friends from Sooner Plant and beyond,
I had to stop and take the time to write to you guys. For two reasons. One is that I will be in training again all next week in Dallas, and I don’t know if I will have time to write to you then. The other reason is because I was just given another Dell Shirt that says, “One Dell. One Community” on it, and it has a picture of a globe with the emoticon 🙂 written across the globe.
For those of you who don’t know what an emoticon is; it is the smiley faces that are sideways when you write e-mails. They are used to express emotion. So when someone says, “Ice Cream”, I write: 🙂 When someone tells a joke, I write: 😀 because that shows that I am laughing (you see, you turn your head sideways to see the smiley face).
I know most of you already know this, but there may be one or two people on my e-mail list that may not quite remember all this. — Of course, when I start rambling, like I usually do when I’m writing these e-mails, then I might write something like: 😦 ) Because my mouth is wide open.
When you guys reply to me and tell me all the fun things that the Equipment Support Supervisor makes you do (I used to say, “Under penalty of Waugh”), then I might write something like this:
>:-< Because it might make me kind of …well… you can see. Ok. Enough with the emoticons.
Anyway. You guys know what I’m writing when I write it. You remember the “Gene Day, Bless his heart” phrase don’t you? Well. I could say the same thing like this: Gene Day, ♥ ♫ but someone might get the wrong Idea. — Anyway. Now you know what’s on my latest tee-shirt from Dell.
Next week I have to go to training again all week. So I will be back in Dallas, as I mentioned. I suppose I will be bored all week, but I’ll be checking my e-mails every evening, so if you write, I will respond.
This week I wrote an upgrade to a program that I wrote almost two years ago. It was the first big program that I wrote when I came here. It is an ASP application (That means that it is a web-based program — which means that you use Internet Explorer to run it). — Since I didn’t have any training this week, I actually had time to sit and program something.
So I added a fun-filled feature to the program and the business partners that use it told me that it would save them 75% of the time it takes for them to do their job, just because of this one feature. So guess what I did.
I told you guys a few weeks ago about how I had to go to “Quality training”. Well. I put this in as a Quality idea, and now when I put this into production this weekend, I will be able to get my “Yellow Belt”. You might remember that that is how they measure your “quality performance” down here, by giving you different belts like they do in Karate.
So, for about 4 hours of sitting and playing on the computer writing a new feature, and about 2 hours of testing it, I will now be able to get my Yellow Belt. I’m sure you guys are all beaming with joy for me. — Yes. I can feel the love all the way down here. — I just looked up at the sticker I have mounted in my cubicle. — The one that says, “Be Safe, Work Safe, cause I Love You Man ♥”
— Yep. I feel the love all the way down here.
I miss getting hardhat stickers down here. All they ever give us are tee-shirts. I mean, how many tee-shirts can you wear at one time? You can probably get 20 or more hardhat stickers on your hard hat, but when I get more than three or four tee-shirts on at once, I begin to get the feeling that I’m a little too confined. I don’t know about you guys. But that’s the way I feel.
Well. It’s Friday afternoon. I hope everything is going well with you guys. Stay Safe. Remember. “Anger is only one letter away from Danger”, and “Cain is only one letter away from Crain”. — So watch out for that Tim Crain guy. You never know…….. I’m just kidding Tim…. Oh, wait. I don’t have Tim Crain on my mail list. Never mind……
I’ll write later,
Your friendly Dell Programmer,
Kevin James Anthony Breazile
______________________
Kevin J. Breazile
Programmer/Analyst III
Dell Inc.
(512) 728-1527
Power Plant Men 