Letters to the Power Plant #114 — Dell and OG&E

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 one hundred and fourteenth letter I wrote.

2/11/05 – Dell and OG&E

Dear friends from Sooner Plant and other worthy friends from of old (not meaning that YOU are old),

I was just sitting here twiddling my thumbs…..Well actually, I have just finished putting three of my programs into production, and now I have a moment of silence before moving on to my next project…..and I thought “isn’t it interesting that both Dell and OG&E have 5 characters in their name?”

Is this just a mere coincidence, or is there more to it?  After all.  I have spent my entire adult life working for companies that have 5 characters in their name!  Is this some kind of omen or something?

Should I pick lottery numbers that all are multiples of 5?  Should I go work on another degree so that I will have 5 little titles after my name?  Is this why I have 5 fingers on each hand?!?  My curiosity just will not sit still until I figure out what it all means!

Oh.  Wait….  I just realized that it isn’t really important, and that I should drop all of this foolishness and move on to something more exciting…..

Like a new paragraph!!!!  So…Here I am on a new paragraph, and I’m beginning to think that I should make this letter 5 paragraphs long, but wait.  I stopped thinking about that already because I was dropping all of that foolishness.  Anyway.  Things are going well down here.  How are things up there?  I feel like I’ve been living in Seattle the last few weeks because it has been cloudy and rainy almost every day for over two weeks.  —  Kind of dreary weather, but it’s not too bad.

I was thinking about a program that I was going to write way back when I was still working up there.  It was going to be a program that had a picture of the inside of the boiler and you could rotate it around (3D like) and point your mouse at different parts of the boiler tubes and it would give you all the information about that section of boiler tubes so that you could see the thickness and which tubes had been replaced, with their tube numbers and all that sort of stuff.  You could even drill down and look closer at each tube.

I would have written it, but I never could get all the information together that I needed to make it work.  It seems that I remember Mark Fielder having a tube of prints that he used to keep all of that stuff updated.  That was what I was going to use for most of the information.  —  Don’t know why I was thinking about that, I just was.

Next Monday we’re adding India to the Timekeeping application.  We will have about 50,000 employees using it then.  I’m basically the only person that supports this application so I’ll be putting that into production.  I’ll be crossing my fingers that everything will work out well.  So I expect that next week will be an interesting one.

There is someone from Employment Services over there teaching them how to use it now.  The Employment Services people this week called me the “Super Kronos Man”.  They said they were going to give me a cape and have someone walk in front of me with a fan blowing on me so that the cape would stay flowing out like I was flying all the time.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this to you guys or not, but I have been keeping an “Elvis Wand” in my cubicle, so that when someone has a serious problem with their computer, I just get out the Elvis wand and wave it over their computer to fix their problem.

Well, Last January 8th, which you all know is Elvis’s Birthday, I went to this Mexican Restaurant named “Chuy’s” and I picked up another Elvis wand (it’s really just an Elvis Fan on a stick that you can punch out the eyes and look through it so that you look like you have an Elvis Face), so I have had two Elvis Wands in my cubicle lately.

This has allowed me to fix twice as many computer problems than before.  Every once in a while I will take one of those Elvis faces and just slide it up over the cubicle so that my old manager, or the System Administrator will see it, and then slide it back down and go on like nothing has happened.  —  People are beginning to wonder.  —  It’s funny how Power Plant Humor just isn’t properly appreciated in the rest of the world.  I wonder why.

Well.  Just so I don’t make this letter 15 paragraphs long, I’m stopping now to say that I miss all you guys and I hope everything is going well up there.  Keep up the good work.  Stay Safe!!!, Watch out for the Yellow Flag and the 4 imps and don’t let the bed bugs bite!!!  I’ll write later, let me know how things are going up there.  —  It was good hearing from you guys.

Your friendly Dell programmer,

Kevin James Anthony Breazile, BA, BS, MRE, MBA

______________________

Kevin J. Breazile

Global Financial Services I/T

Dell Inc.

(512) 728-1527