A Power Plant Backstabbing Experience
Originally posted December 7, 2013:
Usually when I write a Power Plant Man post, the story is about the Power Plant Men and Women I worked with during the 20 years I spent at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. Today’s post, however, is more about a particular experience I had during this time period. Some Power Plant Men at the plant were witnesses to the events, but for the most part, this was personal.
This story begins early in the morning on New Years Day 1987. Some time around 3:00 am. I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night from the bed where I was sleeping at my parents house in Stillwater, Oklahoma where my wife and I were visiting on New Year’s Eve. It felt as if someone had crept into my room and stabbed me in the back with a knife!
Instead of replying “Et Tu Brute” (pronounced “Bru Tey”), I jumped out of bed, flailing to fight back, only to find that Kelly and I were alone in the room. A quick search of my back with my right hand told me that I didn’t have any external injury, even though the pain indicated that a knife of some sort was still piercing my lower back as if someone was working the knife around trying to increase the pain.
Not wanting to wake my wife, I left the room and went into the hallway. I figured I must be having a kidney stone. I seemed to recall a similar pain many years earlier when I was a boy. At that time the pain didn’t last too long, and I figured that I would just drink some water and hope that it would work itself out quickly.
Some of you who have experienced this pain probably guessed this from the start that I was having a kidney stone. there isn’t much that is more painful than having a kidney stone, especially if the kidney stone is of any size and spiky.
I did finally wake up my wife and tell her that I thought I was having a kidney stone. She is an RN, and I figured she would know what to do if I passed out from the pain. Besides, I didn’t want her to think the house was haunted if she woke up and heard some moaning and groaning out in the hallway.
Luckily for me, the kidney stone was small and without spikes. I was able to pass the stone through the painful stage in less than hour. It felt as if I had dropped a pebble right into my bladder. A quick trip to the bathroom, and I emerged with a little stone the size of a piece of sand.
The next morning (still New Year’s Day), we drove back to Ponca City where we lived at the time. We were only about 3 miles north of Stillwater when all of the sudden, I was hit with another stabbing pain. This time coming from the lower left side. It was that same experience as a few hours earlier.
I was able to pull the car into the gas station at Bill’s Corner. I climbed quickly out of the car, paced back and forth for a minute or two, and then climbed into the passenger seat as Kelly drove the rest of the way home. At some point on the way home. I think it was about the time we passed the power plant, the stone had worked its way down into the bladder and the pain was over.
We scheduled an appointment with a Urologist the following week, and when I arrived at the doctor’s office, I gave him the two kidney stones and he had them analyzed. They were the typical kidney stone made of Calcium Oxalate. The doctor’s advice? Cut down on my calcium intake. Ok. So, I stopped drinking a glass of milk each morning before I left for work.
The result was that every 3 months I churned out another kidney stone. For the next 10 and a half year, every 3 months I had a kidney stone. Sometimes they were easy. Other times they were difficult. It depended on the size and shape of the stones.
Notice the irregular shape of these kidney stones
I began saving them in one of those cases that people use for their contact lenses. The ones that have a side for the left contact, and one for the right contact.
A contact lens case with an L and an R for the Left and Right eye.
I would put the kidney stones from my left kidney in the Left side, and the right Kidney in the R section. How did I know which was which? It was easy. Was I being stabbed in the back on the left or the right.
So, what does this have to do with Power Plant Men? Well, at times the Power Plant men had to deal with me while I was in the middle of having a Kidney stone. Most of the times it was just as a bystander sharing in my misery as they watched me pace back and forth as pale as a zombie. Other times it was riding shotgun in peril of their lives as I struggled to bring my car safely to a stop while writhing in pain.
Here are some instances I remember. One day when Scott Hubbard and either Toby O’Brien or Fred Turner were in my car as we were driving to work, I was suddenly hit with a bat across my lower back. I vaguely remember saying, “Oh No!” I asked Scott Hubbard, who was sitting in front with me to dump the contents of my lunchbox out on the floor of the car.
You see, when a kidney stone is in full swing and the feeling of intense pain begins to build up, there is a plexus of nerves around the kidneys that send a message to the stomach that it would be best if the stomach is empty. Meaning that any recently eaten breakfast should be evacuated as quickly as possible.
I struggled to remain conscious and sane and to keep the car on the road. We were only about a mile from Bill’s Corner (where I had stopped during my second kidney stone on New Years Eve (many years earlier). So, I headed for there as a place to jump out of the car. Only this was a much worse kidney stone that during the last time I pulled into the gas station to switch sides with my wife. I was going to have to turn around and go home. I wasn’t going to be passing this one any time soon.
When I climbed out of the car, I made it to the back of the car just in time to eject the contents of my stomach onto the pavement. When you are sick and you vomit, it usually makes you feel better because that it over. When you have a kidney stone, vomiting is only about as much relief as taking a breathe.
Luckily some other Power Plant Men had stopped at the gas station to fill up their vehicle and they had enough room to take Scott and Toby, (or was it Fred… Fred? You read these posts…. was it you?). I asked Scott to tell our foreman that I wasn’t going to be in for work today.
I climbed back into my Honda and pointed the car toward home. With my Little Playmate Lunchbox open at my side, I drove home. When I walked in the door at home, my wife immediately knew what was happening. She comforted me by saying, “Poor Beast.” While I began the ritual of drinking water and pacing around the house.
A lunchbox exactly like this
You see…. At this time I no longer went to the doctor or the hospital when attacked with a kidney stone. I had learned my lesson many years earlier.
Early on, in Ponca City, when I had a kidney stone, I went to the hospital bent over in pain and having visions of my life passing before my eyes as if I was already in the middle of judgement day. When I would arrive in the emergency room, they would give me a shot of morphine to ease the pain.
The problem with morphine was that I was already using all my mental faculties to suppress the pain, and as soon as the morphine would begin taking effect, it took away my ability to block the mentally blocked pain. I would end up, for about 20 minutes while the morphine was taking its full effect on my senses, climbing the walls in really intense pain. Then eventually they would send me home where I would be sick from the morphine for about a week even though I may have passed the kidney stone in a day or two.
During the worst kidney stone I encountered while I was living in Ponca City, (during the first 3 years that we were married), it took about 5 day to pass this one stone. It was especially rough. Usually the only relief I had from this particular stone was to pass out from the pain. Pacing didn’t seem to work. Drinking water didn’t seem to work. It seemed like this particular stone was stuck right at the bottom of the Ureters. That is, the urinary tract just before the bladder. I knew that if it would only fall into the bladder, the intense pain would be over.
I remember how this passed very clearly. I was kneeling on the side of the bed saying a Rosary (the Sorrowful Mysteries of course). One of the Sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary is to meditate on the Scourging at the Pillar. That was what I felt I was going through at the time, so I had been saying the sorrowful mysteries all week.
A rosary
I finally prayed to God something I usually refrained from doing…. I said to Him. “Father…. this is enough. This is all I can take. Please take this away from me.” Almost immediately the kidney stone dropped into my bladder. Oh my gosh! I climbed up into the bed and fell asleep. The pain had finally ended after 5 hard days.
I was awoken 5 hours later. My Father was calling me from Florida where he was working at a Veterinary Clinic training the employees of the clinic for continuous education. (See the post “I Think I Can, I Think I Can and Other Power Plant Man Chants” to learn more about my Father and Tom Houghton who owned the Veterinary Clinic). He told me that about 5 hours earlier he was struck with a kidney stone.
My father, though he had one kidney stone when I was a boy, was not prone to kidney stones like I was. It seemed as if the moment that I was relieved of my pain, my Father had picked up the torch and carried on the pain. I apologized to him, because I had prayed that the pain I was feeling would go away and it seems as if he had to experience whatever pain I was meant to finish bearing. The coincidence was too much to belief. He had just passed the stone and wanted to call me to tell me, since he knew that I was regularly experiencing kidney stones at the time. I resolved from that time on, to go ahead and suffer through whatever pain was being sent my way, because it appeared as if it was for a reason of some sort. I never prayed to have the pain leave again. Only that I was able to endure it.
Back to the Power Plant. One day Diana Brien and I were doing some work in the Coal yard Maintenance building, where the Labor Crew called home. We had driven the electric cart to the coal yard to work on whatever we were working on. The moment we sat in the cart to head back to the electric shop. Wham. I was hit with a kidney stone.
I didn’t want to mention it to Dee. There was no need in worrying her, or embarrassing me, so I just remained silent. I just held onto the side rail on the cart and closed my eyes. As we banged over the railroad tracks and down the gravel road on the hill, I just held on and thought…. “don’t throw up…. don’t throw up….” I concentrated real hard to try and ease the pain.
A yellow electric Cushman cart like this
When we reached the shop, without a word, I walked into the shop and straight into the bathroom, where I began peeling back clothing. That is, I undid my belt, and unsnapped my pants. I paced a few minutes… then feeling the kidney stone hit the bladder, I relieved myself and walked back out into the shop. I figure all the jostling about on the bumpy road in a cart with no suspension system helped move the stone down quickly.
Dee and Scott Hubbard knew right away what had happened to me. There was no hiding the pale face and the sweat that was running down my face. I went in the office to rest a while. After a while I was ready to go back to work.
So, for all you kidney stone sufferers, here is a few words of advice. Today I have passed more than 55 kidney stones. I have never had one of them removed by any other means than passing them myself. I have passed very large kidney stones. Some so big you could crush them in your fingers.
My largest kidney stone was almost as large as this one.
First of all. Don’t panic. Kidney stones won’t kill you (at least not right away). The first thing that happens is that the muscles in your back tighten up. This is not a good thing. You need the muscles in your back to relax. Concentrate on relaxing those muscles. I used to use a handheld massager to try to relax the muscles. Now I just concentrate on relaxing the back. Today when I have a kidney stone, even a large one, I am usually able to pass it within hours.
A handheld massager like this
Pace a lot. Drink a lot of water. You will only move the kidney stone down into the bladder by drinking water and pacing (or a massager maybe). I walk back and forth in the house. I have a path that I take. I walk back and forth, then I sip water each time. Don’t worry about throwing up. It’s just part of the reaction to the pain.
I only have about one kidney stone of any size once each year these day. I found that taking a good dose of CitriCal each day (yes. Extra calcium, has reduced the number of kidney stones considerably).
If you are Catholic… then offer the pain up for souls in Purgatory. It is our belief that the painful time that a person suffers in purgatory can be shortened by someone else offering up their pain for someone in purgatory. Note the difference between suffering and pain. Pain is the sensation you receive. Suffering is what you do with it. When you accept the pain and you “embrace” it, then you suffer it. If you moan and groan a lot, you basically pass it on to others. You tell them…. “I am in Pain.” Then they empathize with you and in a sense “feel your pain.” If this helps comfort you, ok. If you want to offer it to someone in Purgatory, then accept your pain in silence (I realize this makes no sense for those who do not accept the idea of Purgatory).
For those Christians that are not Catholic, let me offer you another way to suffer the pain from a kidney stone when it is too intense to bear. St. Paul said the following: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24). With this in mind, the pain felt during a kidney stone has great meaning. It literally unites you with Christ during his Passion.
I realize this has been an odd break from the usual Power Plant Man Post. The power plant man posts for the remainder of the year will be those posts that include stories from the time that the plant was ruled under the “evil plant manager” Eldon Waugh. Beginning in January, for the next year, the post will be stories during the reign of the plant manager, Ron Kilman (1987 to 1994). During the year 2015, the stories will be during the reign of Bill Green until I left the electric company (1994 to 2001).
Comments from the original post:
When Enough Power Plant Stuff Just Ain’t Enough
Originally posted March 21, 2014:
As a young novice Power Plant Summer Help, I had watched seasoned Power Plant Men measure the distance between two points by walking between them and multiplying the number of steps by three. At first I wondered how they could be sure that their strides were all exactly three feet apart. Because the end result of these actions usually came out pretty close to their estimate, over time I began to think that the length of the stride of any respectable Power Plant Man must naturally be three feet.
So, one day when I was working on going to pull a cable from one manhole to the next, I decided I wanted to know the distance before I pulled a lot of cable off of the cable reel. So, I remember that I grabbed the tape measure out of my tool bucket and began walking at as normal of a gait as I could.
I thought if I measured the first step, or even the last step I took that it would somehow be a different size because I wasn’t moving at my normal speed. So. I figured I would surprise myself by just stopping at some random step as I walked between the two manholes.
I don’t know if anyone was watching me as I stood out in the field just north of the two smokestacks, if they were watching me, then they would have seen me pause and stand still for a moment looking down. Start messing around with my feet. Then take a few more steps. Pause once more and do the same thing.
What I was doing was stopping in the middle of my stride when I had just put a foot down, before I lifted the other foot and with my Stanley metal tape measure, I was measuring the distance from the back of one heel to the back of the other heel.
A Standard Power Plant Issued Stanley PowerLock 25 foot metal Tape Measure
I can’t say that I was too disappointed to find that my stride was not exactly three feet. I hadn’t figured I was completely Power Plant Man material anyway. It turned out to be exactly 30 inches. Or two and a half feet. So, I realized I was about 3/4 Power Plant Man measured by my stride.
I found that I could easily walk between two points and measure the distance with great accuracy by multiplying the number of steps by two and a half feet. With great knowledge comes great responsibility…. or…um… something like that. Hence the story about how enough was not quite enough.
During the spring of 1992 I was tasked with running telephone cable to various points around the plant. We were going to begin installing a new computer network known as the “Ethernet”. When I first heard the name, I thought they were referring to something in space, where it used to be the belief that there was an area called the “Ether”. But as it turned out, it was the regular network that is still in use today.
Dennis Dunkelgod from Oklahoma City had come to the plant with a bunch of drawing much like they did a few years earlier when they wanted me to install the Dumb Terminals all over the place. (See Post “Working Smarter with Power Plant Dumb Terminals“). This time the diagrams included places where PCs were going to be placed. And where the network server was going to be setup. This required much better quality wiring than the dumb terminals.
So, Dennis saw to it that I had 1/2 mile of 100 pair telephone cable to run from the main plant up to the coalyard. Along with the cable came a box of 25-pair punchdown blocks. I’m sure you’ve seen punchdown blocks in movies when someone is tapping into a phone line, so they go up to these punchdown blocks and hook their handset up to the wires and listen in.
Telephone punchdown block
One of the places where I needed to place a number of computers was in the warehouse and the warehouse office. There were no good phone lines running to this building. There were barely enough to take care of the phones that were in the office at the time. So, I needed to figure out how to run the telephone cable to the warehouse which was the southern-most building in the main plant grounds.
Across the drive from the warehouse was the garage. When I looked at the phone panel in the garage, this looked like a good place to tap into the phone system. There were two 25 pair blocks in this building for only one phone. Enough for all the computers in the garage and the warehouse.
All I needed to do now was figure out how to pull a 50 pair telephone cable from the garage over to the warehouse. After looking for the conduit that brought the existing cable into the garage, I was able to determine how it went over to a hand hole at the north corner of the building and then over to a manhole not far away.
A hand hole was a shallow hole in the ground that has buried conduit coming into it. Our handholes had a large piece of concrete covering it.
A man standing in a handhole
When I looked at the handhole I suddenly remembered that in during the week of March 21, 1981 I had visited the Power Plant to pick up my application to apply for working as a summer help for my 3rd summer. I was wearing a beard that day when I arrived. While I was in college, I usually wore a beard in the winter to keep my face warm because I rode my bike a lot, and it helped keep my face warm.
I had my friend Tim Flowers with me that day because he was going to apply to be a pre-novice Power Plant Man and work as a summer help also that summer. It was snowing that day and it was almost 4:30pm. Quittin’ Time by the time I had said hello to the many Power Plant Men that I hadn’t seen since the previous summer.
We were heading back out to the parking lot when I heard someone hollering at me. I looked over toward the garage and there was Jim Heflin sitting on a backhoe digging a ditch. He had turned off the backhoe so that I could hear him yelling at me.
Here is a picture of a backhoe
The Backhoe that Jim was on didn’t have a cab on it. He was all bundled up trying to keep warm. I believe when he pulled down his face warmer, he too was wearing a beard. He said that before he could go home that day he had to finish this rush job to dig a ditch all around the back and side of the garage.
When I returned the next summer Jim asked me if I remembered him digging the ditch in the snow that day in March. I told him I did. Then he said, “Come here.” We walked around the side of the garage, and sure enough. There was the ditch still open leading around the side and back of the garage. He said, “It was such a rush job I had to stay out in the snow digging this ditch before I could go home, and it has been left untouched since then.
The reason I bring this up, was because the ditch he had been digging was for the conduit that went from the handhole around the back of the garage and over to the warehouse. Later that summer the Construction crew from downtown came out to the plant and laid the conduit in the ditch and covered it back up. So, I knew how the cable needed to run from handhole to handhole over to the warehouse. Oh. Before I forget. Here is a picture of Jim Heflin with a beard:
The Splittin’ Image of Jim Heflin
So, back to figuring out how to get the cable to that warehouse. I measured how far it was from the punch down blocks to where it went down into the ground. From there I walked with my normal gait (which I knew was exactly 30 inches – remember?) counting my steps.
I measured how many steps it was to each handhole and over to the warehouse. where the conduit came up out of the ground and went into the warehouse. In this manner I calculated that I needed 775 feet exactly.
I figured I didn’t want to use the 100 pair cable. That was a lot more cable than we would ever need for this job, so I went up to Bill Bennett’s office and told him that I needed 775 feet of 50-pair telephone cable to go from the garage to the warehouse. He said that he would order some.
I don’t remember what time it was when I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night thinking that the length of cable was just going to reach the telephone junction box, and not enough to comfortably reach the punch down blocks halfway up the junction box. So, when I arrived at work in the morning I went straight to Bill’s office and told him that I should have ordered at least 800 feet of cable instead of 775, just to be safe. Bill told me that he had already placed the order for 775 feet. It was too late to change it.
I thought to myself… surely when you order 775 feet of cable they will send some reasonable amount, like 1000 feet. Would they really cut it off at 775 feet exactly. So, I told myself it would be all right.
Sure enough. a couple of days later a reel of 50 pair telephone cable showed up in the electric shop. In big numbers written on the side of the real in red marker were the numbers “775 ft.” Oh geez.
Ok. Somehow I was going to have to make this work. Cross my fingers that maybe my stride was only 28 and a half inches now instead of 30 inches and I had measured it longer than it really was.
So, I pulled the cable from the garage, through the manholes over to the warehouse. In order to pull it from the last handhole into the junction box in the warehouse I had strapped some mule tape to it that I had strung earlier through the conduit using a fish tape. I remember going inside and beginning to pull the last bit of the cable to the junction box hoping to see the end of the cable come up out the conduit.
As I was pulling the cable, I could feel the cable beginning to bind up as it was tightening up in the last handhole. I was still only holding mule tape when I couldn’t pull anymore. Meaning that I didn’t have any cable yet.
So, I went back to the garage and pushed as much cable into the conduit that I could and still punch down the wires on the punchdown block. I even lowered the punchdown block in the junction box hoping that the extra foot would help. Then I went to each handhole and pulled the cable from the garage in the direction of the warehouse until it was as tight around the corners as it would go.
I had managed to pull an extra 2 feet or so into the last handhole. Now all I had left was to go into the warehouse and pull the mule tape to see if the cable would reach the junction box. — Suspense. Yeah. I know.
When I pulled the last 2 feet of cable from the handhole into the junction box, the end of the cable came out. But only about 1 foot of cable was in the junction box. A punchdown block is about 1 foot long.
So, in order to be able to punch the telephone cable down on the punch down block, I had to put the punchdown block at the bottom of the junction box, right where the cable came out of the conduit. On both ends of the cable, I never had to cut one inch of cable from either end. After making sure I had every inch of cable pulled tight through every handhole, I punched down both ends using the handy dandy Telephone wire punchdown tool.
Telephone wire punch down tool
I told myself that from now on, I was always going to throw in a couple hundred extra feet whenever someone asks me how much cable I need. That was too close! You would have thought I learned my lesson.
Now, 22 years later, I still have the same problem as a business analyst at Dell. Part of my job is estimating how long it is going to take to complete various parts of a project. I always make the same mistake and try to over-analyze it so that I can give a really accurate value. The problem is, that I don’t take into account that things take longer than you would think because of factors out of our control.
My project managers know me well enough to take the number that I give them and add a decent amount of time to my estimates. I even tell them that they should because I always underestimate the time. I always estimate how long it would take me to do it personally and I’m not usually the person that is actually writing the code.
Through the last 12 and a half years while working at Dell, I have never missed a go-live date. Oh. Just like this story, we finish on time, but with little or no time to spare. We are always up to the wire. Beginning right when I said we would and ending on the date we planned. Believe me. Just as I pulled every inch of slack out of that cable that day, we end up doing the same with the progress of our projects.
So, I guess I still haven’t learned to properly pad my estimates to reduce the risk of falling short. I think it has something to do with my personality and the way everything has to be mathematically calculated in my head.
Comments form the original post:
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Hah! my stride (heel to toe) is 3 feet, two strides to the link. That’s what practice does.
But I have learned to add 10% to everything (nearly), somehow it always gets used. 🙂
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In the early 70s I was an assistant to a surveyor in a large electrical contractors when we tendered for, and won, a contract to rewire a local Town Hall, the unusual thing about the job being that the engineers had specified pyro (fireproof) cable throughout the building, some of which was large three phase stuff and very expensive.
We scaled up the runs from a 1:100 drawing and placed the orders according to those measurements, each of the large cables being cut specially for that run – every single length was wrong when it was installed, short by several feet.
It took a lot of measuring on site to realize that the drawings were totally inaccurate, this was a Town Hall that had been built in stone around 150 years earlier and some of the walls were two or three feet thick, on the drawings they looked like standard stud walls.
Expensive lesson to learn but I kept my job 🙂
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Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
MEASURING YOUR STRIDE—IS THAT ANYTHING FOR A NOVICE LIKE LOOKING FOR SNIPE IS FOR A YOUNG BOY SCOUT?
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They always told me to expect things that needed measurement to be available in one of only two quantities: Too much, or too little. I discovered for myself that cutting something to fit where it was needed inevitably reclassified it from on of those categories to the other …
Power Plant Pilfering and Being Peeved with Peavler
Originally posted April 5, 2014:
Today, work ended in a strange way. I was working away at Dell when I had a call with a business partner to go over some configuration of our timekeeping application. When I joined the call, the person on the other end of the line, who usually sounded like a normal woman with a slightly Hispanic accent sounded more like an insect alien with a very nervous tic.
I tried several quick remedies on my computer to resolve the audio issues I was experiencing. You see, at Dell, when we use the telephone, we are actually using our computer with a headset attached. After shutting down a few processes that I knew were not necessary in the hope of clearing up our communication, I thought that maybe rebooting my computer would be the simple solution. That was the lesson I had learned back at the gas-powered power plant in Harrah Oklahona in 1985.
Ellis Rook had told me back then that he didn’t mess with trying to figure out why the phone system wasn’t working. Whenever there was a problem, he preferred to just reload the program from disk, which took about a half an hour. No worries that all the phones in the plant would be down for a half an hour as the Rolm Phone computer was rebooting. So, I rebooted my system, since restarting the communication program didn’t work.
A ROLM Phone Computer
When my computer rebooted and I attempted to log in, when the screen would go blank just before the moment when you would expect the wallpaper to show up, my computer would indicate that it was logging me off and then would shutdown only to restart again…. Drats! …and I had this important call with my coworker that I was sure had not really changed into the alien that had been talking to me moments before.
I tried this a couple more times, and each time the computer would shutdown and restart. So, I swiveled around in my chair and turned to my current manager who was sitting across the bullpen cube from me and I said, “My computer has crashed.” It just keep restarting. She replied, “Go take it down to the computer clinic and have them fix it. They are great! They will fix you up right away.
Our bullpen cube is like this only bigger to fit seven docking stations. adding an extra seat in the back and one extra on each side
On a side note, I just want to add that my current manager at Dell has been the absolute most influential manager I have ever met next to Charles Foster. She has perfected the art of “Expanding her bubble”. Charles taught me this technique many years ago.
So, on a side note of a side note, let me just tell you what my former foreman Charles Foster at the Power Plant did once. He ordered some equipment for everyone in the electric shop which ran into a few “extra” dollars. When he was called on the carpet to explain why he thought he had the authority to make this purchase, he explained it this way:
“When I went to ‘manager training’ they told me that during your career you will have times where it will be necessary to perform activities that you are not sure you are able to perform, so you should go ahead and try them. If you get your hand slapped, you just pull back and don’t do that again.’ This is called ‘Expanding your bubble’. I was just expanding my bubble.” He said Ben Brandt, the assistant plant manager, looked at him with a blank stare for a moment, and then told him that he was free to go. Evidently, according to the listening devices that we had hidden in his office, Ben turned to Tom Gibson, the Electric Supervisor, and said, “That’s a pretty good explanation.”
I bring this encounter up, because my current manager, Ali Levin, of whom I also have the greatest respect, just recently had an opportunity to expand her bubble. She was so successful that those around her that know what she has accomplished just stare in awe at her. I predict that within the next decade this young lady will have become the CIO (Chief Information Officer) of a Fortune 500 company (mark my word).
So, what does this all have to do with Charles Peavler and Power Plant Pilfering? Well. The final verdict from the super technicians down in our computer repair lab, said that since it was Friday afternoon, I wouldn’t be able to have my computer back in working order until Monday morning. Which meant that I would have to go all weekend without being able to log in and perform feats of magic on my laptop.
Ok. I was resigned to go home early and wait patiently until Monday morning when I could begin popping up various applications and flipping between them and the multiple Instant Message windows talking to various business customers throughout the day as I performed the satisfying dance of my day-to-day job. So. I left work early.
This evening as I sat down to create a post about Power Plant Men and my previous life working as an electrician at a Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahama, the sudden loss of my computer flashed me back to a time when someone that was working with me experienced a similar loss. Instead of a laptop. This electrician had lost a set of “Jumpers”.
Electric Jumpers
Ok. These jumpers don’t look like much, I know. But jumpers are almost as important to a plant electrician as a laptop is to an IT developer at Dell. That is, you just can’t get your work done without it.
So, it was either Donald Relf or Bob Eno who was working with me on Friday, March 29, 1993. During overhaul, we had been calibrating precipitator control cabinets all day. Much like today, April 5, 2014 when my computer died. At the end of the day as we were packing up our equipment Bob or Donald, I don’t remember, saw me leave my tool bucket next to the old typewriter stand that we were using as a portable workbench. He asked me if it was safe to leave our tool buckets there over the weekend.
I assured him that the coal-fired plant in North Central Oklahoma hired only “top-notch” Power Plant Men. His tools would be perfectly safe sitting out in the Precipitator control room over the weekend. I was so confident because I had always left my tools where I was working in the precipitator during overhaul and I had never had anything stolen. If anything, someone may have left me a present of chocolate behind only because they knew that I always did favors for chocolate.
You can imagine my surprise when we returned to the Precipitator Control Room on Unit 1 on Monday morning only to find that Bob (or Donald) had their jumpers missing from their tool bucket. We each used 5 gallon buckets to carry our tools. Mine had been untouched. No extra chocolate that day, but no unsavory fingerprints were detected.
I had a black tool bucket like this
As it turned out, we relied on Bob’s (or Donald’s) jumpers to do our job, so we actually had to return to the electric shop and create a new set of jumpers for him. I felt so ashamed. After all, I had so proudly explained that only those with the greatest integrity worked at our plant, and he didn’t have to worry about leaving his tools, and here I was having to cover for his losses. This was the only time in the 20 years I worked at the Power Plant where someone had stolen something from a tool bucket when they weren’t purposely playing a joke on me.
When I found time that day, I went to the control room and asked the Shift Supervisor if he could tell me who worked as the Unit 1 auxiliary operator over the weekend. I knew that this would narrow the culprit down to three people. He looked through his logs and said that Darrell Low, Charles Peavler and Jim Kanelakos had Unit 1 over the weekend.
Knowing how the shifts worked, I knew that each of these people had walked through the Unit 1 precipitator exactly 3 times over the weekend, before we returned on Monday morning. I also knew that no one else would have ventured to stroll through the Precipitator control room who was working over the weekend on overhaul. I knew this because of all the hundreds of hours I had already spent in this control room over the weekend, only one operator per shift ever visited. It was usually my reminder to take a break and go to the bathroom and buy something from a vending machine before returning.
I studied this list. Hmmm….. Darrell Low…. A person with impeccable character. Would love to play a good joke when given the change, but honest as the day is long. Jim Kanelakos…. Devious at times, but personally a very good friend. A person so dear to me that I him kept personally in my daily prayers. Charles Peavler… well… by the title of this post…. you already know the rest of the story.
I eliminated Darrell immediately since I knew his character and I would trust him with my life (which I actually would at times when he would place clearances for me). I suspected Peavler right off, but I thought I would make sure that Jim Kanelakos wasn’t just playing a joke on me first. So, I approached him and asked him if he had taken a pair of jumpers from a tool bucket in the Precipitator control room over the weekend.
At first Jim looked at me with a hurt feeling that I thought might be a perfect expression if he was playing a joke on me. He was holding the look of sorrow and hurt that I would actually accuse him vaguely of stealing a pair of jumpers from a tool bucket. When I pressed him on the issue. The hurt look changed to a look of resolve and he said directly, “No. I didn’t take them.”
I knew immediately that he was telling me the truth. Jim and I had worked together with Charles Peavler on the labor crew together. We actually used to analyse his behavior as sort of a joke, and kind of a refresher of our Psychology background. Jim Kanelakos had earned a Masters Of Arts in Psychology, while I had a bachelors in the same field. So, we used to have fun joking around together about the unusual behavior of Peavler.
Charles Peavler looked like the Sergeant on Gomer Pyle. Except that he had chewed tobacco so long that his lower lip was permanently curled so that he looked like Popeye. I say that because they had the same lower jaw and the same amount of hair on his head:
Popeye or is it Charles Peavler
Once I was certain that Charles Peavler had taken the Jumpers from Bob’s (or Donald’s – I’m relying on one of you telling me which one) tool bucket, I approached him with the attitude that I already knew it was him. I came up to him in the Control room and said, “Charles! You know that pair of jumpers that you took from that tool bucket over the weekend? I need those back!”
I explained to him that I had told the visiting electrician that it was safe to leave his tools there because no one would touch his stuff. So, I felt personally responsible to get the jumpers back. Charles immediately denied that he had taken the jumpers. He said that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I told him that I had checked, and he was the only person over the weekend that would have taken them. So, I needed them back. He continued to deny that he had taken them.
As the overhaul was lasting a few weeks longer, I continually approached Charles in the middle of the control room where the Control Room operators were within earshot asking him to give the jumpers back to me. I would tell him how I need them so that we could continue our work. Also I would explain each time that the reputation of our Power Plant was at stake.
Finally one day he said, “Well. I don’t have them here. I took them home.” — That was a great relief to me. I had been continually accusing him day after day of taking those jumpers. I was finally glad to find out I hadn’t been accusing someone falsely, which was always a vague thought in the back of my mind. The moment he told me he had taken the jumpers home, I jumped on him (not literally – though the thought occurred to me). I said, “I need those jumpers back!”
It took about a week. Each day whether he was on the day shift or the night shift or the evening shift, since we were on overhaul working a lot of overtime, he was not able to escape me. I would go up to him and ask him, “Did you bring those jumpers today? ” Each time in the middle of the control room, quite loudly.
Finally, about a week after he admitted having the jumpers when I asked him about it in the middle of the control room, he went into the locker room and soon returned with the pair of jumpers and handed them to me. I quickly returned them to Bob (or Donald), and apologized profusely for the inconvenience. I didn’t tell him exactly what had happened to the jumpers, only that I had finally tracked them down.
I guess, he didn’t know that I knew him so well. So well in fact that to this day, I have kept Charles Peavler also in my prayers every day. When he lost his mother in on April 1, 2000 (fourteen years this week), I felt his loss also. He left the plant on July 29, 1994 during the last (and the worst) downsizing the Power Plant ever experienced. To this day, though I was peeved with Peavler back then, I still care for him deeply. I don’t think he was a “True Power Plant Man”, but neither was Jim Kanelakos or myself.
Some day Charles will meet our maker. When he does, he will be able to say, “Yeah. I did steal a pair of jumpers once. But I ended up by giving them back.” I clearly remember the look of relief that day when Charles placed those jumpers in my hand. It was if a heavy burden had been lifted. Actually, by that time I had decided that it was as important for Charles to give back those jumpers as it was for Bob (or Donald) to get them back. Something had compelled him to lift that pair of jumpers, I think it was an opportunity for him to face reality. I thought that he was having a “Come to Jesus” moment when he confessed.
I often wondered what Charles’ mother Opal Peavler would have thought of Charles. I suppose she finally found out. I suspect that by the time she found out, that Charles had mended his ways. After all, he was on his way when we had danced this dance in the middle of the control room that week in 1992. He did finally admit that he had stolen something. I’m sure he thought at the time that an electrician could easily make a new pair of first class jumpers. We wouldn’t care that someone had come along and taken one measly pair of jumpers.
Actually, if Charles had ever come to the electric shop and asked any electrician for a pair of jumpers, any one of the electricians would have been glad to whip up a pair as if by magic. I think it was just that one moment when he was alone with a tool bucket staring at him and a perfectly prepared pair of jumpers were gleaming up at him that in a moment of weakness, he decided he could pilfer this pair without anyone knowing.
To tell you the truth. I was very proud of Charles Peavler the day he placed those jumpers in my hand. Geez. I didn’t realize until after I finished this post that I have a picture of Peavler:
Charles Peavler is the one standing on the left with the Pink shirt.
Vertan or Sand and Making an Enemy of a Power Plant Man
Originally Posted April 18, 2014:
When I was an electrician at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma I inherited working on the Precipitators from Sonny Kendrick, the Electrical Specialist in the electric shop. One time after I had been struggling with the performance of the precipitator trying to lower the emissions of Fly Ash going out of the smoke stacks, I encountered a very odd situation.
One morning as I was walking out to the precipitator as I passed the Unit 1 boiler I noticed that a couple of tanker trailers were sitting outside the bottom ash area. Hoses had been attached to one of them and were running up the side of the boiler. What looked like a pump was running. I didn’t have a clue what was in the tanker. I figured it was just some routine thing that power plants did every so often to make things more interesting. You wouldn’t believe how many times Power Plant Men would come up with new and interesting things just to keep me in awe. (Of course, I am easily amazed).
A Tank Trailer like this
Anyway, I didn’t really pay much attention to the tanker on the way to the precipitator. I just walked around the tankers that were there and entered the precipitator switchgear and up the stairs to the Precipitator control room where 84 control cabinets were waiting for my attention. On the way into the switchgear I had glanced up at the smoke stacks and noticed that the exhaust from the boiler was looking pretty good.
As I walked passed the control cabinets that controlled the back of the precipitator, I was surprised to find that they were powered up all the way and there wasn’t any sparking happening. Well. I thought. Maybe they are at low load and not much is happening inside the precipitator this morning.
As I walked between the two rows of cabinets toward the cabinets that controlled the transformers near the intake of the precipitator, my surprise turned into astonishment. I had never seen the front cabinets powered up to such a high level with no sparking. Everything was 180 degrees from the way I had left the cabinets the evening before when I was struggling to adjust the power to lower the emissions.
After going through each of the cabinets adjusting the power levels higher only to find that I was able to easily increase the performance even further, I returned to the electric shop for break. When I arrived in the electric shop office I told Charles that something very strange had happened this morning and I’m trying to figure it out, because all of the sudden the precipitator was operating at maximum efficiency.
After break I walked back out to the precipitator control room past the tanker trailers and found that everything was still running smoothly. “My work is done” I thought. I decided to go to the top of the precipitator and start working on fixing malfunctioning vibrators for the rest of the day.
I worked on the precipitator roof until noon, and then went back to the shop for lunch. I sat with Charles as we talked about movies we had seen. Charles was telling me about how the song for Ghostbusters had been on the radio. When the song said,
“If there’s something strange
in your neighborhood
Who ya gonna call?
GHOSTBUSTERS”
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Charles’ son Tim (not having seen the movie) thought that instead of saying “Ghostbusters” they were saying “Who ya gonna call? Charles Foster!” Besides being exceptionally cute, it was also an honor for Charles for him to hear Tim sing, “Who ya gonna call? Charles Foster!”
After lunch was over I went back out to the precipitator control room to check on the cabinets one more time. To my surprise when I walked through the row of cabinets, they were sparking again as they had been the day before! Not quite as bad, but bad enough that I had to go through the cabinets and adjust them back down almost to the levels where I had them before.
It took longer to adjust the cabinets down than it did to raise them in the morning. When break time came along, I was too engrossed in adjusting the cabinets to notice, so I continued working through break. It must have taken me close to three hours. At that time I was still using a small screwdriver on some potentiometers inside each of the cabinets to make the adjustments.
About the time I finished, all the sudden something happened. The cabinets began acting the way I had seen them in the morning! All the sparking stopped and the cabinets began powering up to the highest point they could go based on where I had set them. Ok. Now I needed to find out what was going on!
I walked out of the precipitator and headed for the Control Room. I walked past the tanker trailers and noticed that the pump was running again. I hadn’t thought about it, but when I had walked by them a few hours earlier they had been turned off. This was curious. I figured that it was more than a coincidence.
Pat Quiring was the Unit 1 Control Room operator when I arrived. I asked him what has been going on with Unit 1. I explained to him that when I arrived in the morning I found the precipitator running smoothly, then later it wasn’t, and just a few minutes ago, something happened again and there it was. Pat said two things were going on that day.
One thing was that we had been burning a pile of sand that had been soaked with oil. They had been mixing it with the coal at the coalyard and blowing it into the boiler with the pulverized coal in order to dispose of the hazardous waste. Hmm.. This was a possibility. I couldn’t see how the sand would make a difference, but maybe the mixture of the chemicals in the oil had something to do with it.
Then I asked him. “What about those tankers on the side of the boiler? Why are they there?” Pat said that we were also burning Vertan. Well, not “burning” exactly. We were destroying it in the boiler, because it was chemical waste that needed to be disposed and it is easily destroyed into it’s chemical components in the heat of the boiler.
“Vertan? What’s Vertan?” I asked Pat. He said it was some chemical used to clean boiler tubes. These tankers had been sent to our plant from another plant that had just had the boiler tubes cleaned, and we were just burning it off to get rid of it. They had a schedule they were using to burn the Vertan. They couldn’t just get rid of it all at once because it caused a buildup in the economizer that caused the airflow to be affected through the tail end of the boiler.
So, I wondered, maybe this has to do with airflow. Diverting the airflow to different parts of the precipitator could definitely affect things. The cabinets out in the middle of the precipitator definitely had different electrical properties than those out on the edge.
I suddenly realized that this was 1988 and the Internet was not readily available to the typical user, and the World Wide Web still had a few years before it was widely going to be used. Frustrated that I couldn’t just go “Google” something for another ten years, I did the next best thing that I could do. I decided to pay a visit to our Power Plant Doctor! I wrote about Doctor George Pepple in the post “Power Plant Doctor Does a Jig in a Puddle of Acid“. He was the head Power Plant Chemist.
I went to the Chemistry Lab and found George working away on some diabolical experiment. No. Not really, he was probably just testing some water samples. When Dr. Pepple was working on any kind of chemical test, he did it with such mastery and grace that it always reminded me of a mad scientist.
I asked George about Vertan. He explained to me that it was a chemical that was mixed in water and pumped through the boiler tubes to clean out calcium buildup and the like. I mentioned to him that I thought it may be affecting the operation of the precipitator and I was curious to know more about it.
Professor Pepple then explained to me that Vertan was called TetraAmmonia EDTA. EDTA? Yeah, he said, “Ethylenediaminetetraacetic Acid”. He said this just like my Animal Learning Professor, Dr. Anger used to say “Scopalamine” (See the Post “Poison Pill for Power Plant Pigeons“).
I wrote down this information and I continued monitoring the progress of the precipitator throughout the rest of the week. Each time the pumps were running on the Vertan trailers, the precipitator operated as if it was new and completely clean. Each time the pumps turned off, the precipitator reverted back to the regular mode of operation, only it would be a little better each time. By the time all the Vertan had been destroyed in the boiler, the precipitator was running very well on it’s own.
Over the weekend I went to the University Library at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater and Looked up TetraAmmonia EDTA. Not much had been written about it. I was able to find an article about it in a Journal. It had the chemical composition.
Vertan or TetraAmmonia EDTA
A few years later when the Internet became available I was able to find a better model of the Vertan molecule:
Vertan or TetraAmmonia EDTA chemical model
I mentioned that at the same time that the Vertan was being burned in the boiler, we were also blowing contaminated sand into the boiler in order to burn off oil that had soaked into the sand. At one point, I had to go work on the head end of the number 10 long belt to find a 480 volt ground in a circuit. When I arrived, I could see where the oil from the sand had caused the coal to cake up on the belt and cause a big mess where the conveyor dumped the coal onto the belt 12.
There didn’t seem to be any correlation between the times that sand was being burned. The process for burning the sand lasted a lot longer than burning off the Vertan. By the time that the sand was burned off, the precipitator was humming away operating at near maximum efficiency. So, it seemed as if the sand didn’t have anything to do with the increase in performance.
I was convinced that burning Vertan in the boiler was more convincing. If not Vertan, then just injecting water could have been a factor. Since the Vertan was in water and they were pumping large amounts of water into the fireball in order to destroy the Vertan. Maybe the increase in Humidity had something to do with the improvement.
A couple of years later when the “We’ve Got The Power” Program was underway (See the Post, “Power Plant ‘We’ve Got The Power’ Program“). Terry Blevins and I were investigating the idea that Vertan could be used to improve the performance of the precipitator. We found that Ammonia Injection was used to treat Precipitators.
This is done by injecting ammonia into the intake of the precipitator to treat it when it was performing poorly. This reinforced our idea that Vertan was the main reason that the precipitator had responded favorably during that time since Vertan broke down into Ammonia at high temperatures. Even then, we didn’t exclude the possibility that the increase of humidity may have also played a role.
Another team had the idea that injecting sand into the intake of the precipitator would improve the performance of the precipitator by sandblasting the ash off of the plates. They had seen this happen when sand had been burned earlier. I had rejected this idea as being viable. I knew that the velocity of the airflow in the precipitator was no faster than 4 miles an hour. Hardly fast enough to keep grains of sand airborne.
It was worth a try though, and the other team pursued the idea and ran a test by injecting the sand. It definitely wouldn’t hurt anything to try. The idea was rejected by the Steering Committee (Ron Kilman), based on my input, even though something extraordinary happened during the test. When this happened, I became the instant enemy of the team leader.
I will cover this dilemma in a later post (possibly next week). For now I will just leave you with the knowledge that because I had chosen Vertan over Sand, I had definitely made an enemy of a True Power Plant Man.
Making Friends from Foes – A Tale of Power Plant Woes
Originally posted April 25, 2014:
Later in life, thinking back to when I was young, I sometimes wonder at how my first real friend, Mark Schlemper remained my friend throughout my childhood. I remember as a boy, there were times when I wasn’t the friendliest friend. Sometimes I was downright selfish. Mark, on the other hand, was always considerate. Not in an Eddie Haskell way, but in a sincere way. I learned a lot about being a kinder person from Mark, and I’m forever grateful.
My favorite picture of Mark Schlemper with his Mother
I think if Mark had not been my friend during my childhood, then this story would have a very different ending.
Last Friday (April 18, 2014), I posted a story called “Vertan or Sand and Making Enemies of a Power Plant Man“. At the end of that post I explained that I had become the enemy of a team leader during the “We’ve Got The Power” program. I explained this program in the post: “Power Plant ‘We’ve Got The Power’ Program“. With all that said, here is the story:
I was a plant electrician at a coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma when we took part in the “We’ve Got The Power” program. At the time, I was in charge of maintaining the Unit 1 precipitator. The precipitator is what takes the ash out of the exhaust from the boiler, so that you don’t normally see smoke coming out of a Power Plant Smokestack.
My bucket buddy in the Electric Shop, Diana Brien was on a team that tried an experiment on the Unit 1 precipitator by injecting sand into the intake duct in the hope that it would increase the performance. I didn’t put much faith in the experiment, because it was based on something that had happened almost a year earlier when sand was burned in the boiler in order to burn off the oil that had been soaked into the sand.
I hadn’t seen any sand build up in front of the precipitator during the next overhaul, and didn’t believe that any of it had been able to make it’s way through the economizer and the air preheaters to the precipitator.
Diagram of a boiler. The precipitator is after the air preheater where it is labelled “Flue gas”
When Ron Kilman asked me about it, I said that I didn’t think it would do any good, but also, it wouldn’t do any harm either, so I told Ron that I couldn’t see any reason not to do the experiment. Who knows. Maybe something unexpected would happen. — Something did, but not quite in the way anyone would have expected.
On the day of the experiment, sand was blown into the intake duct of the precipitator. When the experiment was taking place, Diana Brien sat at the precipitator computer behind the Unit 1 Alarm Panel in the Control Room. She was printing out readings every so many minutes as the experiment progressed.
At times, I walked by and checked on her to see how it was going. One time when I was standing there watching the readings on the computer, all of the sudden the Opacity shot up. Opacity is used to measure how much smoke is going out of the smoke stack. Something definitely happened to cause a large puff of smoke.
I switched screens to look at the power on each of the control cabinets. After a few seconds I found that cabinet 1A10 had zero Volts on the secondary side of the transformer. It should have been somewhere above 40 Kilovolts. The cabinet hadn’t tripped, but it wasn’t charging up the plates. Cabinet 1A10 was in the very back row of the precipitator, and when the power shuts off on the cabinet it readily lets go of the ash that had built up on it when the rappers on the roof strike the plates.
When I saw the puff occur, I knew where to go look, because this happened whenever one of the back cabinets was turned off. I told Dee that it looked like a fuse had blown on the cabinet. The ash was going to continue billowing out of the precipitator for a couple of hours if I didn’t go do something about it. So, I told Dee that I was going to go to the Precipitator Control Room and replace the fuse.
I passed through the electric shop to grab my tool bucket and headed out to the precipitator. When I arrived, I found the cabinet just as it had indicated on the computer. The fuse had obviously failed. Interesting timing. Coincidence? I thought it was. The fuses controlling the back cabinets were usually the ones that blew because we ran them at a much higher voltage than the rest of the cabinets (at the time).
This is a picture of the exact fuse I replaced, except the print was orange instead of blue
I quickly replaced the fuse (after attaching grounding cables to the leads, and using a pair of high voltage gloves). Then I powered the cabinet back on.
High Voltage gloves like this
I returned to the Control Room and told Dee that I replaced the fuse on cabinet 1A10. The opacity had returned to normal. I watched a few more minutes to make sure everything had stabilized, and then I left.
When Ron Kilman was evaluating the results of the experiment, he could plainly see that something strange had happened. Smoke had been pouring out of the smoke stack in the middle of the experiment. So, he asked me what I thought about it.
First of all, as a disclaimer, our team had our own experiments we had been conducting on the precipitator in hopes of coming up with money savings ideas. So, when I told Ron what had happened with the fuse blowing, I wondered if he would trust me to tell the truth, since I had my own skin in the game.
I explained in detail to Ron how the fuse had blown and that I was standing next to Dee watching the computer when the smoke started blowing out of the stack. I could tell that a fuse had blown by looking at the readings, so I went out and replaced the fuse. I told him that fuses do blow periodically in the back of the precipitator, but I couldn’t explain why it happened to fail at that particular time. After I gave him my explanation, he seemed satisfied that I was telling the truth.
I think a token amount of points were awarded to the team because something obviously had happened during the experiment, though it wasn’t clear that sand had anything to do with it. On the other hand, our team was awarded a large amount of points for increasing the precipitator performance using a different method that I may bring up in a later post. To the team that burned the sand, this looked a lot like foul play.
The leader of the team was the Shift Supervisor Jim Padgett. He became very upset when he found out that I had gone to the precipitator control room during the experiment and worked on the equipment. Our team had been awarded a lot of points that was enough to purchase the dining room table set that I have in my dining room today:
Dining Room Table received as an award from the “We’ve Got The Power” program
It became known throughout the control room and the electric shop that Jim Padgett viewed me as his enemy. The other electricians would jokingly refer to Jim as my “friend”, knowing that Jim had basically declared “war” on me. Any time someone in the shop would have something to say about Jim, they would say, “Kevin’s friend” Jim Padgett….”
When I first became aware that Jim was upset with me, I understood why. If I had been in his shoes I would probably feel the same way. It’s a rotten feeling when you believe that someone has cheated you out of something important. So, I decided up front that I was going to become Jim’s best friend. This is where I think my memory of Mark Schlemper with his patience for me as a boy helped me with this decision.
I had determined that any time Jim asked me to do something I wouldn’t hesitate to help him. It took about a year before Jim could look at me without grimacing. Finally, one day, he asked me if I would go look at something for him to see if we needed a clearance, or if it was something that could be fixed right away. It was something minor, but I knew that this was an indicator that the ice was finally beginning to melt. I was able to fix the problem on the spot, and returned to let him know.
Once we were on semi-speaking terms again, I took an opportunity one day to ask Jim if he would like to join our Computer Club. I had started a Computer Club in the Electric Shop. Anyone could join it for a one time fee of $5.00 that was used to buy shareware and disk cases. For a while I also published a newsletter letting the members of the club know what games and such we had that could be checked out.
Once Jim Padgett joined the Computer Club, it was much easier to have a regular conversation outside of the normal daily business. I had put the thought in my mind when I decided that Jim was going to become my best friend that nothing would make me happier than to be able to do something for Jim. That way, no matter what I was doing at the time, if Jim asked me to do something for him, I would drop whatever I was doing and do my best to help.
I could go on and on explaining how gradually over time, not only was Jim my friend, but Jim acted more and more as if I was his friend as well. Let me just say that the entire process took almost exactly ten years. I can remember the exact moment when Jim indicated to me that I had become his friend.
Here is what happened:
The phone next to my bed rang at 2:15 in the morning on Thursday February 17, 2000. I instantly knew what it meant when the phone rang in the middle of the night. It meant that someone at the plant was calling because there was a problem. Who else would be up on in the middle of the night? The night shift of course.
When I answered the phone, Jim Padgett said, “I hate to wake you up buddy.” I replied, “No. That’s okay. What’s up?” Jim explained that the dumper was down and a train was about halfway through dumping the coal and everything was dead in the water. I said, “Ok. I’ll be right out.”
I turned to Kelly and told her that I had to go fix the dumper. She already knew of course. I pulled on a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt, and on the way out the door, I slipped on my work boots and laced them up. Then I drove the 30 miles out to the plant.
It was just before 3:00 am when I arrived. I grabbed my hardhat from the electric shop and took the elevator up to the Control Room. Jim apologized again and told me that how the dumper acted when it shutdown. I went back down the elevator to the electric shop where I grabbed the key to the pickup truck and my tool bucket and left the electric shop into the cool night air.
Power Plants at night take on magical properties. It’s hard to explain. Lights shining from the 25 story boilers, noises from steam pipes. Hums from motors and transformers. Night Hawks screeching.
When I arrived at the coalyard, I went straight into the Dumper Switchgear where the relays that controlled the dumper were mounted. Having worked on the dumper for the past 17 years, I could troubleshoot the circuits in my sleep. — Actually, I may have done just that. It didn’t take long, and I had replaced a contact on a relay that had broken and had the Coalyard Operator test the dumper long enough to know it was going to work.
When I returned back to Control Room Jim was sitting in the Shift Supervisor’s office. I walked in and showed him the small relay contact that had caused the failure. Jim, looked at me and said something that I thought only a friend would say so casually. I won’t use his exact words, though I remember not only the exact words, I remember his exact expression. He indicated to me that he had passed some gas, and he was apologizing about it. I replied, “Well. That happens.” (No. Not the other thing that happens). I told him I was going to go home. It was about 3:40 by that time.
Jim wished me a good night, and smiling with gratitude, thanked me again for coming out. As I was going back to the parking lot, and on the way home driving through the dark, tired from being woken up in the middle of the night, I had a great feeling of peace. That brief conversation with Jim just before I left was so pleasant in an odd way that I knew we had become friends. This was such a long way from where we had been 10 years earlier when Jim had literally wanted to kill me (well, not that he actually would…).
When I arrived home, I peeled my clothes off in the utility room to keep from tracking coal all over the house. I set the small broken relay contact on the kitchen table as a token to my wife, so she could see why I was called out when she wakes up in the morning. I climbed back into bed around 4:15 to sleep for another two hours.
That morning when I arrived at the plant, the first thing I learned was that about the time that my alarm had woken me up that morning, Jim Padgett had left his shift and driven to his home in Ponca City. When he walked in the door to his house, he collapsed and died instantly of a heart attack. That would have been about 3 hours after the moment that we had said goodbye.
Jim Padgett is on the far left along with his crew of True Power Plant Men
I grieved for Jim’s wife Jane, who had worked for a while at the plant before marrying Jim, but I didn’t grieve for Jim. Something told me, and maybe it was Jim, that he was at peace. In the moment that I heard about Jim’s death, I burned the conversation we had just had that morning into my mind so that I would never forget it.
To this day whenever I know that someone is upset with me for something that I have done to them personally (which still happens occasionally), I am determined that they will become one of my best friends. I will do anything for that person if they ask (unless, of course it is to “not be their friend”). I have my childhood friend Mark Schlemper to thank for the attitude that helped me decide to reach out to Jim Padgett. Without that experience while growing up, Jim and I would never have become friends.
I would like to leave you with a song that reminds me of Jim whenever I hear it. It is called “Bright Eyes” from the movie “Watership Down”. Art Garfunkel sings it:
Note: If you are not able to watch the video above, try clicking this link: Bright Eyes, Art Garfunkel
Comments from the original post:
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I’m glad that you were able to work through a tough situation and reach the point of friendship. although, it does make the loss harder to accept.
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Your story would have been a matter of course for my grandparents and immediately understood and admired by my parents. I suspect that telling it to today’s children might draw blank stares …
Midwestern values likely still include such behaviors, at least for a reasonable number of people. I doubt many folk on the coasts would identify with it. We have lost a lot and have yet to learn the price of that, seems to me.
Early Morning Power Plant Wake Up Call
Originally posted May 30, 2014:
Unlike the story I told a few weeks ago about Jim Padgett, this is not a story about being called to work in the middle of the night by a true Power Plant Man (See post: “Making A Friends from Foes – A Tale of Power Plant Woes“) or even like the story that explained the “Power Plant Black Time and the Six Hour Rule“. No. This is a quick story about a sobering slap in the face I encountered when walking into the electric shop one morning at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
I think this must have been when I was on someone’s short list for a “Power Plant Joke”, or maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention a month earlier when Bill Bennett may have informed me that this morning was coming. Either way, I was totally taken off guard when I entered the shop that morning with Scott Hubbard, my Carpooling buddy.
The first indication that something was up was that there were three contract hands standing there dressed in their worn clothing indicating that they had been hired to do some kind of “manual” activity. Yep. Worn jeans with holes. Shirts slightly ripped. One guy missing the sleeves on his shirt. I think one of them had accidentally taken a shower before he showed up. He may have mixed up his Mondays and Saturdays and woke up grumpy on Saturday and took a shower on Monday.
None of the contract hands had thought about shaving for the past week or so. So, they definitely looked out of place in the shop usually occupied by professional Power Plant Electricians, who liked to keep themselves clean and generally followed good hygiene practices.
My first thought was, “Hmm…. Looks like there is some dirty job someone has to do in the shop today. I wonder what it is.” I walked into the electric shop to wait until 8:00 to come around. Bill Bennett was leaning against one of the desks talking to Charles Foster. I asked Bill, “What’s up with the Contractors?”
Bill replied, “They are here to help you.” “What am I going to be doing?” I asked curiously. “You know. Pulling wire from the Vital Service Panel to the Telephone Room in the main office.” “Oh. That.” I replied trying to remember if I could recall ever being told that I was supposed to be inheriting this particular job.
The last time I had felt like this was when I was in High School and our American History teacher told us that the semester class projects were due tomorrow and he continued to explain that we would be presenting the projects in alphabetical order. “Which means that Kevin Breazile. You will be going first.”
Side Story Time:
Class Project? Oh No! I had forgotten all about it! I was supposed to write a paper about the Roadway system in the United States, including how we were preparing to go to the Metric System.” (Like that ever happened… This was in 1976).
So, after school I went straight home and told my mom that I needed to go to the Public Library to prepare for a class project that needed to be done tomorrow. At the library I quickly grabbed a bunch of facts out of encyclopedias. I made up a few statistics about how many miles of roads there were in the United States.
Then once I was back at home, I thought about the roads in the U.S. Well, there were dirt roads, gravel roads, asphalt roads, and roads made of concrete. So. I filled a jar with dirt. One with some rocks I found out in the street. I found a piece of asphalt that had worked itself loose at the intersection by my house. I also found a chunk of concrete under our deck in the backyard where we had busted up our patio once to pour a new one…. These were my props for my presentation.
I remembered that on the way from Kansas City To Columbia Missouri along Highway 70, there was a sign that said, 100 Miles or 160 Kilometers to Columbia. There was also one just outside Saint Louis going to Columbia that said the same thing. So, I added that to my presentation. This met the requirement of how the roadways were moving to the metric system.
When the presentation began, I began handing the jars to someone in the front row to pass around the class….. Yeah. A jar of dirt. A jar of rocks, and a piece of asphalt and the chunk of concrete. I remember our teacher, Mr. Wright grabbed the chunk of Concrete when I gave it to the guy in the front row and looking it over, then pointing to a spot on it and saying, “I can see the skid marks here where I almost hit you!”
Anyway. I ended the presentation by taking the chunk of concrete after it had been passed around the class and holding it up and saying that if we continued to create roads at the same pace that we have over the last 60 years, by the year 2076 the world will look like this…. And I held up the chunk of concrete. — Of course.. I had totally made that statistic up out of thin air. — I got an A+ for that project which was worth 1/3 of our grade for the semester.
End of side story.
So, here I was again, fourteen years later, and I was being told that I had a crew of guys standing out in the shop waiting for directions on how to pull cable from the Logic room just below the control room, across the T-G building and into the middle of the Office building on the top floor. Even though the Office was on the 3rd floor, it was equivalent to the 6th floor of an office building.
From experience, I knew that the cable would have to be pulled from the logic room down to the cable spreading room below the main Switchgear, through two manholes, then up through conduit to the office area above the break room kitchen and over to the Telephone room.
I had done nothing to prepare for this. I hadn’t looked through the blueprints to find the best route. I hadn’t even seen the large spool of wire on the pallet in the Main Switchgear waiting to be used. I hadn’t even prepared myself by looking confident like I knew what I was doing….
Bill walked out the door leaving me in the office with Charles. I wasn’t sure if Charles could tell that I was completely blind-sided by this job or not. But he did give me a quick “leg up”. He said, “Seems to me that there is already power going from the VSP (for Vital Services Panel) to the Telephone room.”
Well. I already knew that I was really lucky. Especially when I asked Saint Anthony to help me find a solution to a problem. So, I quickly glanced over in the corner where Saint Anthony liked to lean against the wall while he waited for me to come to my senses and have some faith. In my mind I could see Anthony shrug like, “sounds like you might give it a try.”
St. Anthony of Padua
So, I walked… no… I strolled out into the shop like I belonged there….. — Oh… yeah. I did. But at that particular moment I didn’t feel like it, so I thought maybe if I walked like I felt like I did, it would help me feel that way.
I asked Scott Hubbard if he could help me check to see if we had power in the Telephone Room from the Vital Services Panel. He said he would be glad to help (this was Scott’s usual response. — A True Power Plant Man Response).
Scott Hubbard
I asked him to go the Telephone room while I went to the Vital Service Panel for Unit 1 in the Logic Room. Scott took his handy Dandy Voltage Checking Tool and headed off toward the Office area.
Electric Voltage Tester
I headed for the Logic Room with a pair of Fuse Pullers:
Bussman Fuse Pullers
The Vital Service Panel is mounted on the wall next to the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). I opened it and read the labels inside of the cover. After scanning the list of locations that were fed from this panel I found one that could have been the one circuit I was looking for.
It was cryptically labelled in pencil “Telephone Room”. Hmmm…. I wonder if this is it… My mind had quick as a snap decrypted this entry and came up with “Telephone room”. — That sure sounds like this would provide power to the Telephone room. Let’s just hope that it is labelled correctly.
I waited until Scott called me on the gray phone to tell me that he was in place by the Telephone room. He had checked all of the receptacles (plug ins) in the room, and they all had power on them.
Gaitronics Gray Phone
I told him that I would remove the fuse to the circuit that looked like it provided power to the telephone room, so in about 15 seconds, he could check to see if any of the receptacles was dead. So, we did just that. I removed the fuse….. — My first thought was…. Good. I didn’t trip the unit. I would have known that right away. — You never know… pulling a fuse out of a panel labelled “Vital Services Panel” kind of leaves you to believe that the stuff in this panel is really really important.
A smaller fuse block than one in the VSP
I went back to the gray phone and waited for Scott to get back on the phone. About 15 more seconds and Scott returned. He told me that the power had turned off on one of the receptacles on the wall. I told him I was going to put the fuse back in and head up to the telephone room so that he could show me where it was.
Literally 20 minutes after I had been jolted awake by the revelation that I was supposed to lead a crew of contractors on a wire pull that I had not prepared for, I had found out that the wire was already there. No wire pull was necessary.
Scott showed me where the receptacle was, and we walked back to the electric shop. Bill Bennett was standing in the shop wondering where I had disappeared to (oops. ended the sentence with a preposition. I should know better than that. I should have said, “….where I went.”). I was still wondering in the back of my head if I had just completely forgot that Bill had ever told me about this, or maybe he had forgotten to mention it in the first place, or he had not told me on purpose just to see how I would react to the sudden revelation that I had a semi-difficult job with no time to prepare for it.
I waited for Bill to follow me into the electric shop office. Which he did. Standing there with as straight of a face as I could muster, I looked at Bill as he asked me when I was going to start pulling the wire. The Contractors are just standing around doing nothing.
I said, “The job is already done. The wire has already been pulled.” “What do you mean? It’s still in the switchgear on the pallet.” Bill responded. I shrugged and said, “We don’t need to pull wire from the Vital Services Panel. There is already a circuit from that panel to the telephone room.” I looked over at Charles and smiled. Charles smiled back. Bill said something like, “Oh… Then I wonder what we are going to do with these contractors. We have them for three days.” Then he left the office.
Charles Foster
I thought that somehow Charles knew something about my being “setup for some kind of failure” and had this up his sleeve all along so that it would backfire. — Just my luck. With three of my best friends standing there, how could I fail…. Charles Foster, Scott Hubbard and Saint Anthony.
We had the contractors sweep out switchgears for the next 3 days.
Comment from the original Post
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St Anthony of Padua never fails us if we believe in him, he has never let me down 🙂 Enjoyed your post
Back to Plain Ol’ Power Plant Back Pain
Does anyone know where the phrase, “Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother’s Back” came from? I’m sure there is a story behind that one. Maybe even a lot of different origins. I can distinctly remember a day in the Power Plant when a Power Plant Man stepped on a crack and broke his own back.
I remember looking out of the seventh floor window of my friends dorm room when I was a freshman in college watching students returning from classes about 6 months before the Power Plant Man broke his back. I was watching closely to see if any of them were purposely missing the cracks as they walked down the sidewalk toward the entrance. Out of about 20 people two of them purposely stepped over every crack in the sidewalk.
In the post “Power Plant Safety is Job Number One” I told the story about four of us were carrying a very long extension ladder through the maintenance shop at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma one summer morning in 1979 when Tom Dean stepped on a crack (well, it was a cracked piece of plywood that had been placed over a floor drain because the floor grate was missing), and when as he stepped on it, he lost his balance enough to twist himself around. By the time he stopped twirling, he was in immense pain as he had destroyed any chance for comfort for the next 6 months.
A Cast Iron Floor drain cover was missing from the drain
So, I could understand the dangers of stepping on cracks even when they appear to be insignificant. What that has to do with my mom I’m not sure. However, one day when my sister was walking with my mom on the campus of Oklahoma State University, my sister may have stepped on a crack at that time, as well as my mom, which sent her plummeting the five feet to the ground resulting in a broken hip.
This makes me wonder that since the times have changed, it may be time to change the saying to something else. Maybe something like “Smoke some crack, break your parent’s piggy bank” would be more appropriate for these times. Oh well, I’ve never been much of a poet.
Anyway, back to the subject of back pain.
The number one favorite topic during Safety Meetings at the Power Plant was Back Safety. We were told (and rightly so) that accidents where the back is injured cost the company and the employee more than any other injury. Once you really hurt your back, you can expect to have back pain the rest of your life. It only takes one time. — Times may have changed since 1979, so that now you can have some excellent back surgeries to help correct your back injuries. Even with these, you will never be completely free from back pain.
In the Power Plant Post, “When Power Plant Competition Turns Terribly Safe” I told a story about how our team came up with hundreds of safety slogans in an attempt to win the coveted Power Plant Safety Award Pizza at the end of the year. A Pizza that continued to allude us for 2 and a half years. During our meetings to invent the most catchy safety slogans, Andy Tubbs (or was it Ben Davis) came up with a slogan that said, “Lift with your legs, not your back. Or you may hear a lumbar crack”. — See. I wish I could come up with doozies like that! This takes the idea of a crack and a back and turns it around, if you think about it. Now instead of a crack hurting your back, its about a strain on your back creating a crack. — I know… probably just a coincidence….
Lumbars don’t really crack. The discs indicated in blue become damaged
One morning Sonny Kendrick, our electric specialist at the time, while sitting in the electric lab during break, let out a whopper of a sneeze. When he did, he suddenly knew what it felt like to experience tremendous back pain. One sneeze and he was out of commission for many weeks.
Sonny Kendrick as he is today or… yesterday…
One day, when Charles Foster, my very close friend, and electric foreman, were talking about back pain, I realized that a good portion of Power Plant Men suffered with back pain. — At the risk of sounding like Randy Dailey teaching our Safety Class, I’m going to repeat myself, “You only have to hurt your back one time to have a lifetime of back pain.”
The company would focus a lot of their safety training around the importance of proper lifting techniques in order to prevent back accidents (not to be confused with backing accidents which is when you back out of a parking space — which is also a common accident — though usually less severe — unless you happen to be a Ford Truck). We would learn how to lift with our legs and not with our back.
You see, it wasn’t just that one sneeze that caused Sonny’s plunge into Back Pain Hell, and it wasn’t just stepping on the cracked plywood floor drain cover that broke Tom’s back (I know “Broke Back” is a misnomer since the back isn’t exactly broke). The problem is more systemic than that. This is just the final result of maybe years of neglecting your back through various unsafe activities.
The two important points I remember from watching the safety videos during our monthly safety meetings was that when you slouch while sitting, you put a needless strain on your lower back. So, by sitting with good posture, you help prevent a future of pain. The second point I remember is that you need to keep your stomach muscles strong. Strong stomach muscles take the weight off of your back when you’re just doing your regular job.
The big problem that finally causes the disc in your lumbar region of your spine to break after neglecting it through these other means is to lift a heavy object by bending over to pick it up instead of lifting the load with your legs. So, the phrase that we always heard was “Lift with your Legs. Not your Back”. You do this by bending your knees instead of just your hips.
Ok. I know you are all thinking the same thing I am thinking (right? Yeah. You are). Bending both your knees and hips saves your back. Isn’t there another word for when you bend your knees and hips at the same time? — Yeah. Yet, I don’t remember hearing it during any of our Safety Videos. — Oh. It was implied, they just never came out and said it…. What they really mean to say is, “Squat”. Yeah. “Squat”. When you bend your knees and hips, isn’t that “Squatting?”
Times have changed…. I mean….. Doesn’t everyone today have a “Squatty Potty”?
The Squatty Potty Logo
Don’t we all have “I ‘heart’ 2 Squat” tee-shirts?
See how happy you can be to Squat?
To learn more, you can watch this video:
This doesn’t just work with the Squatty Potty to help you drop your loads, it also works when lifting heavy loads. So, remember the next time you are going to bend over to pick something up…. Squat instead.
Other lifting tips include keeping the load close to your body and not holding your breath but tightening your stomach muscles, and don’t lift something too bulky by yourself. Don’t twist your body when picking something up, face the load directly. A weightlifter once told me that when you lift, feel the weight on the heel of your feet, not on the balls of your feet.
Randy Dailey, the Safety Guru of our Power Plant, and an expert machinist invented a pen that you could put in your pocket protector in your shirt pocket that would alert you by beeping if you leaned over too far. It was an ingenious device to remind you to lift with your legs instead of your back.
In one of the safety videos we watched about back safety, there was a short stalky scientist that explained the dynamics of lifting and how easy it was to put a tremendous strain on your back by leaning over and picking something up. He said that “People choose the more simple way to pick something up. Not the easiest way.”
Doesn’t that sound like the same thing? Isn’t the simplest way the easiest way? Well. You would think so, but it isn’t always the case. This Doctor of Back-ology went on to explain his statement. He explained that the simplest way to pick up an object on the floor is to bend at the hip. It is one movement. Bend at the hip. — However…. The easiest way to pick up the object is to bend both your knees and your hips to pick up the object. Since you keep your back straight and you lift with your leg muscles that are the most powerful muscles in your body. He avoided using the word, “Squat”, but that’s what he meant.
In order to reduce back injuries at the plant, the company made back belts available at the plant.
A Back Support Belt
Note that this picture not only shows a Power Plant Man wearing a Back Support Belt, but he also is wearing the right kind of Tee-Shirt. It has a vest pocket where you can put a Pocket Protector for your little screwdriver and your Back Alert Pen created by Randy Dailey.
Our Pocket Protectors were freebies given to us by vendors so they would have advertisements on them like these
The use of back belts was new around the late 1980’s. Even though we had them available through the tool room when we wanted them, few people wore them. The warehouse team wore them a lot. I suppose that is because they were lifting and moving things all day long.
In the warehouse Bob Ringwall, Darlene Mitchell and Dick Dale used to have back belts on when I would visit the warehouse to pick up a part, or to visit my friends. I don’t remember if Bud Schoonover would wear a back belt. How’s this for a slogan…. “Be a Safety Black Belt…. When Lifting, wear your Back Belt.” I know. I should stop when I’m ahead, only I’m so far behind now I may never catch up.
There was a question about whether wearing a back belt was really a good idea. It was thought that people might tend to substitute using their stomach muscles while lifting with the back belt, resulting in weaker stomach muscles. So we were cautioned not to go around wearing back belts all day long. Only when we were going to be doing a job where we had to do a lot of lifting. I suppose now, after years of research, there is a lot more data to tell us one way or the other. I haven’t heard what the latest injury jury has said on this subject.
Even though I titled this post “…Plain Ol’ Power Plant Back Pain”, there is nothing plain about back pain. I just thought it sounded like a catchy title.
I was lucky enough that during the 20 years I spent working at the Power Plant, I never really hurt my back. To this day, I have been able to avoid living with perpetual pain in my back. — I have been accused of causing pain in other people’s necks. Also, I don’t think the many times that people told me I was a pain in their back side, they were referring to the Lumbar region. I think they meant an area just below the tailbone. I hope that by bringing to their attention the benefits of the Squatty Potty that I have been able to relieve (or prevent) a little of that lower lumbar pain.
Now when someone says, “You don’t know Squat”, you can correct them!
Comments from the original post:
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I can remember getting into a taxi whilst in my late teens, turning in the seat to sling a bag in the back seat, only to pull something in my back. The pain lasted for ages.
These days, it’s arthritis being the culprit. Back pain is as bad as everybody says it is.
Good page 🙂
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Wasn’t the back alert pen given to someone in the garage to try out. Rumor is they didn’t like it because it kept going off all day every time they bent over.
Hmmmmmm
Letters to the Power Plant #121 — Happy Thanksgiving from Dell
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 twenty first letter I wrote.
11/21/05 — A Happy Thanksgiving from Dell
Dear Sooner Plantians and friends,
It has been hard these days to find the time to write, but things are starting to ease up some. I’m on vacation this week, so I finally have “some” time to write. Notice that even though I’m on vacation I am still logging into work to check on things.
Old habits are hard to…..well….anyway…..I thought I would log in just to see what is going on. I’m going to be in Stillwater this Wednesday night thru Friday night to visit my parents. I think we will be staying at the Hampton Inn, since it’s about the only good Hotel in town.
I hope everything is going well with all of you. I haven’t really heard much lately. Is your new plant manager keeping you so busy that you don’t have time to write either?
We just went through another Reorganization / downsizing. I’m still on the same team I was on last month when I wrote last. Things are finally settling down so that I’m only doing two jobs now instead of three. I’m still the Application Administrator of the Oracle Financials application. That’s the program that is sorta like SAP, but only the Financial module.
So, how is it with your new plant manager?
I keep having strange dreams about the plant, but it has changed so much in my dreams that it has morphed into a sort of Dellish, Power Plantish, Universityish, Europeanish, 18 century villageish sort of mystical place.
I suppose you guys have those sorts of dreams too. — Where you are going to work on some kind of a big piece of equipment (carrying the printout of your Task List), and being chased by some mythical creature that lurks in the boiler and comes out like the monster in Beowulf, out of the furnace to snatch unsuspecting hardhatted fellows.
Then you may stumble into a meeting room in order to have a one-on-one meeting with your foreman, only to find that all the meeting rooms are booked, and there isn’t anywhere to hide, so you go darting out of the room and find your self running down a cobblestone street in the dark trying to remember if you have already taken a clearance on the bowl mill, and whether or not Bill Robinson put the tags on the right one.
Then as you are climbing the ladder up the side of the bowl mill you hear a tap-tap-tapping coming from inside the mill and realize that some tinker is sitting on his three-legged stool tink-tink-tinking away at some wooden object outside the front of his shop where his family has been tinking for centuries. And he is singing a song that sounds like the song that is sung by Intake pumps as they hum along.
And as you leap over the ash pipes by the Intake pumps and stumble and roll into the electric manhole because someone has left the lid off of it and didn’t put up a barricade, and fall splashing into the manhole since the manhole pump doesn’t work and water from Sooner Lake has seeped in and filled it up.
You know I watched a little open motored pump pump that hole dry one day. It was the strangest thing to see that motor running under water. Totally soaked with water. That must have been some clean water.
Anyway. You know how dreams are. When you fall in the dark water of a manhole, you either get zapped by electricity and wake up, or you are suddenly transported to the top of the Fly Ash silo and the only way down is to walk the crosswalk across the top of the silos and make your way down the zigzag stairway since the elevator doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.
And as you walk down the railroad tracks into the dumper, you hear the pound-pounding of your feet on the metal hull of the dumper as you walk through it. The deluge pump on the south side seems to be leaking water down the side of the dumper into the dark coal stained concrete.
As you follow the water down into the dumper and through the grid at the bottom, you crawl out through the hatchway at the bottom of the dumper hopper. Rolling onto the floor you become drenched in the damp coal dust that soaks into your pores and heals your wounds, making you forget your cracked skull and bruised knees.
Following the faint dumper lighting, you make your way to Conveyor 2 and start the long climb to the surface. As you climb higher and higher, you find yourself watching computers flowing by as the conveyor belt turns into rollers that swiftly and cleanly shifts computers this way and that sending them on their way to the customers waiting patiently at their door.
Where they eagerly open their computer boxes and madly assembling the monitor and keyboard and plugging it into the wall, connecting it to the generator that hums in the power plant, being spun by the steam that is made by the coal that came to the plant on the train that was dumped into the hopper and carried on Conveyor 2 up and up to the top of the stackout tower where it is dumped onto the coal pile.
Where brave men in their large yellow coal moving machines run like ants over the surface. Packing and moving and packing again…..
Then the engineering professor points to the chalkboard with his long wooden pointer and his bushy moustache and eyebrows, and funny hat and glasses, and he says “that is the circle of life”. And the crowd roars with applause, and the professor bows and the applause becomes more and more tinny until it is nothing more than a tink-tink-tinking sound that sounds like the sound of the tinker.
Or is it the sound of the footsteps of that horrible creature that lives in the boiler and comes out every now and then to snatch unsuspecting fellows in their yellow hardhats? Creep-creep-creeping up on you. —- You know. Dreams like that. I’m sure you guys must have them all the time. Or perhaps you “Live Them!!!”
Your Friendly Dell Programmer,
Kevin James Anthony Breazile
Letters to the Power Plant #125 — Dell Kiosk Heaven
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 twenty fifth letter I wrote. Keep in mind that at the time when I originally penned this letter I didn’t intend on it being posted online.
11/8/06 — Dell Kiosk Heaven
Dear Overhaulin’ Soonerites,
I figured this is overhaul season and that you are all in Overhaul Heaven, so I’ll try to be brief, since I know you are all “chompin’ at the bit” to climb back into that boiler and ride those sky climbers back up into the vast darkness of space…..
Note to Reader: To learn more about working in the boiler read the post Sky Climbing in the Dark With Power Plant Boiler Rats.
I was very sorry to hear about Floyd Coburn, as the first I knew something was up was when I sent my last e-mail and his address came back undeliverable. — Microsoft is working on it, but it will be a while before we can send e-mails to Heaven. I’m sure Floyd is up there dancing with the Angels now…. Not quite wishin’ that he could be back in that boiler patching tubes… Or….. Maybe he is (in there with you guys)! He can help keep the boiler ghost at bay!
Well. The title of this e-mail is about Kiosks…. And that’s what I should talk about…. Since that is the topic after all…. So…
Dell has Kiosks in malls all over the country. And we have put Kronos clocks in those Kiosks so the employees can use them to clock in and out…. Using their finger. — How about that? You just put your finger on the little reader and it clocks you in and out. No time cards, no nuthin’.
I know that wouldn’t work exactly right at Sooner Plant, but a few weeks ago I was in Orlando Florida going to a Kronos Conference at Disney World and they showed me this nifty wireless device that you could wear on your belt and record your time right there with you.
I kept thinking about how when I was at Sooner, I used to say how someday we would be carrying our computers around with us on our belts, and “by golly” there it was. It would allow you to log in and record your time and all, and if you had wireless at your plant, it would automatically be recorded in the system.
You could use it to log your time working on an M.O. (Maintenance Order for all you “non-plantians”). If you don’t have wireless, then at the end of the day, you just go to the shop, plug the device into the recharging cradle and “voila” (remember. That’s French for….well…it’s French for something that you say when you’re trying to say “There it is!”).
Anyway. I just kept thinking about that and how it would be so much easier than filling out timecards every day…. It’s easy to interface Kronos to SAP, so that’s no problem…. It even has a barcode scanner on it, so you can print out your M.O.s for the day with barcodes, and just scan them. You don’t even have to enter anything, just scan it.
So, I’ve been talking (e-mailing) to people in all these Malls all over the country. The clock in Penn Square Mall in OKC was having an issue and I wrote back to them and told them that I wasn’t able to connect to their clock and I gave them instructions on how to fix it.
When I sent the e-mail I had copied our IT support people in Penang Malaysia, just to keep them in the loop. A few minutes later, I received an IM (Instant Message) from one of the Penang folks (I call it “getting Penanged” when I am IM’ed from someone in Penang). Asking me what we had to do when we can’t connect to a clock.
I explained to her that the problem will have to be corrected at the clock since we can’t talk to the clock until it has been setup on their end. She asked me again. “So, what do we do when we can’t connect to a clock”.
So I spent about 15 minutes walking her through logging into the server and testing the clock, and how she could see that we couldn’t connect to the clock…. Then she asked me again, “What do we do when we can’t connect to a clock”.
So, I told her to open a browser and go to the Dell Home Page. Then click on “You and Dell”, and then click on “Travel And Expenses” Each time waiting to make sure she was following my directions. Then I told her to go to the “Online Booking Tool” and make plane reservations for Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA.
She said she didn’t know her logon name. Then she asked why she would have to go to Oklahoma City and I told her that the only way to fix the clock so that we can connect to it is to fix it at the clock. That’s what she asked me, so I was just showing her how she could fix it if that is what she wanted to do…..
I have the Penang folks all confused about me anyway. I told them I was very old and very fat. I told them once that I kept making mistakes while I was typing because my long grey beard kept getting caught in the keyboard.
Then one day, one of them asked me about a server and I said that it was old and probably would have to be replaced soon since it was over 3 years old. She said that her computer at home was 5 years old, and I said, mine was too, but my daughter had one of those new XPS computers and it was new and very fast.
She asked me how old my daughter was and I told her she was 53 years old. The Penang person just about had a cow. She said, “How old were you when you were married?” I told her that I was married when I was 26 years old. She said. “You’re not 79 years old!” I said. “Golly Gee No! I was married 4 YEARS before I had my first child! I’m not a young whipper-snapper you know.” — So they don’t know what to think about me….
I was training them online one night and I had them all on the phone for about 2 hours doing a Live Meeting. Toward the end I started talking using an old man voice, and I quickly stopped and apologized. I said, I usually just use my young person voice when I’m training people, because it’s hard to understand me when I talk normally…. They didn’t know what to think about it…..
Anyway…. I can see that I’ve been rambling again….gee… When my shirt gets all wet from drool, I can tell I’ve been talking too much, or I just fell asleep for a while and drooled over all my shirt before I even knew I was asleep. I’m not sure which, but I should probably just get back to work. I still have about 100 more clocks to configure.
Talk to all of you later. Have fun, but be SAFE!!!!
Your Pal from Dell,
Kevin James Anthony Breazile
______________________
Kevin J. Breazile
Global Employment Services Support
Dell Inc.
(512) 728-1527
Letters to the Power Plant #126 — Travelin’ at Dell
This is my longest post ever, so make some popcorn, sit back and read the one hundred and twenty sixth letter I wrote to the Power Plant. I wrote it over a two week period and I probably could break it down into about 5 posts, but below is the way I sent it back to my friends at the Power Plant:
4/9/07 — Travellin’ at Dell
Dear Sooner Plantians,
I finally have a few minutes of spare time to write to my favorite buddies up there in the frozen tundra of Oklahoma. Right now I am sitting in the airport in Los Angeles waiting for a plane to Singapore. From there I have to fly to Penang Malaysia to train the IT support team for a week.
I don’t know if I mentioned them before. They are waiting to meet me because I have been telling them that I am really old with gray hair and a long gray beard that gets caught in my keyboard every now and then.
A few weeks ago one of the Penangers (That’s what I call it when they send me an IM – Getting “Penanged”), was IMing me a few weeks ago and was complaining about how Global Warming was causing all the weather to change. I told her that it wasn’t as bad as it was in the 1930s. It was really bad back then.
Then I said, “Oh, but you probably weren’t around back then, were you?” Then one time when they were “Penanging” me, I didn’t reply for a few minutes because I was working on something at the time. So, they started to give me a hard time for not replying right away, and I told them that I am so fat that my hands can’t reach the keyboard when I’m sitting back in my chair because my stomach is in the way and I was just taking a rest.
I asked the Penangers how far away is their workplace from the hotel where I am staying. They told me it was about an hour and a half walk if I wanted to walk there, but that I should take a Taxi. I told them if it was too far, then I would probably have to take my walker with me on the plane, so I could rest on my way to work.
They asked me what a “walker” was. One of my IT friends calls them Penanguins, but I probably told you that already. It has been a while since I wrote last, and as old as I am, my memory isn’t what it used to be. At least I don’t think it is what it used to be, but, I can’t really remember how that was, so I’m just “speculating”.
I’m sitting at a table by some restaurants, and out the window are a couple of palm trees and a bunch of airplanes. — All big ones. They are the planes that fly over the Pacific ocean.
I think my next flight is supposed to be 18 hours long!!! Then I change planes and fly another hour and a half. Arriving in Penang on Sunday morning. (Right now it is Friday afternoon). — I am not writing this “online”. I am just writing it in Word, since the wireless connection in the airport is not being “User-friendly”.
Anyway. I will be teaching the IT support over there how to take care of the applications that I am in charge of maintaining. I tried to get them to send a couple of people from there to come to the U.S. instead of having them send me over there, but they had a big “cat fight” about who they should send, because everyone wanted to meet me, so they decided that it was cheaper to send me than to have their entire IT department fly over to Austin.
One of the items on the agenda is called: “The proper use of the Elvis Wand”. I am bring an “Elvis Wand” (which is a fan with Elvis’s face on it that I use when all else fails. — It has the same effect as when I lay my hands on the monitor and yell “Heal!!”).
I am returning to the U.S. this upcoming Friday night. Then I have to leave again on Sunday morning to fly to Boston where I am a speaker for a bunch of companies that want to know how we do Time and Attendance. Kronos (the timekeeping software that we use) is paying my way.
Hey! No need to pass up a free lunch. — So I am going to see my family in passing, on my way to bed, then on my way back out the door when I wake up early Sunday morning.
I have been getting to know people all over the country since we have been putting Kronos clocks in our Kiosks in the Malls. If you are ever at Woodland Hills in Tulsa, or Penn Square mall in OKC, if the team lead is there, most likely they have talked to me a few times.
I have become pretty familiar with the names of malls lately. It is interesting to see what kind of names they have. Some of them sound pretty fancy, like “The Mall at Wellington Green” in Florida. Some of them sound rather dull, like “Tucson Mall”.
There is one that sounds like a foreign country in Pennsylvania. It is called “Plaza at King of Prussia”. I suppose they have to come up with unique names. There are two malls called “Independence Mall”. Which doesn’t make me think they are “That” independent.
I figured I would make this a fairly long letter, since I have nothing to do for the next couple of hours except sit here and watch the people. The interesting thing I noticed about this airport is that it really seems old and simple.
After taking a trek though the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport a few times, this airport seems way too small. For instance. When I arrived, I was in Terminal 4. My next flight is in Terminal 2. Now, in the DFW airport, you know what that means….
That means that you have to get on the sky link train which takes you around to the place where you get on the shuttle, that takes you way out to some parking lot (because you got on the wrong one! — don’t you hate when that happens?), Then you have to hitchhike back to the airport where you follow the signs to Terminal 2, which must be near the Red River and almost into Oklahoma.
So I was thinking….. “Oh great. I have a lot of time today to go from Terminal 4 to Terminal 2, but when I’m coming back, I only have an hour and 45 minutes.” And that means, going through customs, going out of the secure area and getting my American Airlines boarding Pass, (since I will be on Singapore Airline), then hoofing it to Terminal 4 and going through the security check, all in time to just see the plane taking off without me (or so I imagine).
So, as I exited my last plane, I made my way out of the building to a man standing there looking like he was trying to help people. So, I asked him. “What is the fastest way to get to Terminal 2?” He whipped out a map and said, “See this blue line here? That is this sidewalk. If you walk around this sidewalk, you will see Terminal 3, then you will see Terminal 2, and there you are.”
I’m thinking… “Boy. If that is the fastest way, then the traffic around here must really be bad, or all those buses only take you to parking lots out in some field somewhere. So I said, “Thanks a bunch”, and I headed around the sidewalk. I hadn’t walked 50 yards, and I was already at the main terminal and I could see from what his map had showed me that these terminals are not very far apart, and they aren’t that big. For instance. In terminal 4, I came in at gate 48, and guess what? That’s the biggest number. 48. This is Los Angeles, after all, isn’t it? Isn’t this like one of the biggest cities in the country? — The distance around all these terminals doesn’t look much bigger than walking around the two boilers and T-G building.
Well. I’m going to stop here, to save my battery, until I can find a place to plug my laptop in.
Ok.
Now that was very fun. I made the long trek (not really), to the gate where my next ride is going to arrive in two hours or so. I noticed that a few gates down from my gate there was a plane going to Moscow, so I thought I would watch the people boarding the plane, just to see the kind of folks that were heading that way.
There were a handful of serious looking people wearing bland clothes, and the rest looked like regular Joe’s, so I thought, “now would be a good time to test out the camera on my new mobile phone.” So I stood alongside the line of people getting on the plane, and looked around at them through the camera lens on the phone for about a minute.
Then I zeroed in on two of those bland blokes and acted like I was taking their pictures as they boarded the plane. Then I put my phone back in the holster and picked up my bags and walked off.
So, after doe-see-doeing (imagine that. My spell checker didn’t have “doe-see-doeing” in it — does now) around quite a few pillars, I finally found a place to plug in my laptop. So now, I’m sitting at a gate going to Guadalajara Mexico.
This is definitely a different set of people taking this plane. I suppose it is spring break and some of these people are just heading to a beach somewhere. A much more laid back crowd. This gate is more fun than my own gate.
Besides, I can tell what they are saying over the intercom…. Oh, wait…. They just said something that sounded like “Dos es los quervo por favor”. Does that mean they have Margaritas on that flight? The word Quervo caught my attention.
Looking outside, I see a seagull flying by. It had the appearance of admiration as it flew over those jumbo jets out there. I wonder what must be going through its mind when it sees a big plane like that. — Probably, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
I suppose there must be an ocean around here someplace. — At least, there is when I watch Perry Mason.
I suppose I should be taking a nap right now. After all, it may be 4:30 pm here, but it is 7 tomorrow morning over in Penang right now, and I just stayed up most of their night. I’ll try to make it up on that long plane ride.
Hey, they just announced over the intercom that the plane to Dublin is now boarding. I should go watch them. That should be interesting…… No, I should probably head back to my gate to make sure they didn’t make any last minute changes and move my gate over to Terminal 6 or something like that….
————————————————————————————————————–
Well. It has been a while since I added anything to this letter…. Actually, I’m on my way back home and I’m sitting in the Singapore Airport. Yep. It’s Friday again, and I have spent my week in Malaysia. — Boy. Was that an adventure.
So, here is the scoop. If you have to fly over the Pacific Ocean, the way to do it is with Singapore Airline. They treat you real nice, and keep giving you drinks (I mean the alcoholic type) and they have foot rests that come up so you can sleep better, and they have a TV screen right in front of you where you can watch Movies On Demand, and play video games, and even make a play list where it plays the songs you choose over and over again.
So here is how I spent the 18 hours: I spent 6 hours sleeping. 6 hours playing video games. 3 hours talking to the guy next to me, and hour and a half watching a movie (The Night at the Museum) and an hour and a half eating and looking around at what other people were watching on their TVs.
So, I have something I would like to talk to the Electricians and Instrument and Controls guys, so the rest of you can skip the next few paragraphs:
I was sitting next to a guy that works for “AutoDesk”. You probably don’t remember, but that is the company that makes AutoCAD. The blueprint drawing program. They have this real neat program now for Electrical Schematics, and PLC drawings and you name it. The guy showed it to me and it was impressive.
You can actually have a drawing of a Junction Box, with all the relays in it and wiring (which you can build by selecting the correct model of relays and stuff), and you can click it and go to a schematic diagram or even a Parts List.
You can view PLC programs as a Ladder Diagram and look at the parts, or even look at the layout of the wiring to the different contacts, based on the model number of the PLC. I told him about our meager attempt to come up with a Red Lining Program, back in the Ron Kilman Regime.
Now I want to talk to just Toby O’Brien:
I asked him if AutoCAD had something like that for Piping, and you should see what they have. It was real impressive.
You can build 3D images of piping, then look at the layout diagram, or click on a section of pipe and have it give you all the part number information about it. When designing something, all you have to do is pick your parts, and put them together and it builds a 3D image on the screen. If you want to modify it, you just choose different parts or rotate something, and it builds the thing before your eyes.
Now I want to just talk to the Boiler Rats… Oh yes. You know who you are.
I told the guy that works for AutoDesk about how they need to build an application that would have the racks of boiler tubes that are in a boiler, where you have the ability to remove sections of tubing and put in new tube, with all the serial number and ASME data that you have to keep track of, so that your boiler tubes are “certified”. You know what I mean. I just don’t know the correct term to use.
I explained to him how it is important to keep track of all the tubes sections that go in the boiler, and if they could build something where you could just move your mouse over the different sections of the boiler, then zoom in, then rotate it and zoom in some more, and then just hover your mouse over the tubes and see all the information about that section of tube. — He said he would pass that on to the people who make those decisions.
Ok, for all of you that I haven’t been talking to….. I’m back to just my regular rambling again.
So, I arrived in Penang last Sunday Morning after leaving home on Friday Morning (it was Saturday evening Austin time when I arrived in Penang). I was only there about half an hour before the Penangers called me and told me they wanted to take me out to eat and to look around Penang.
So, instead of resting up after my long trip, I quickly took a shower, and met the team I was going to be training. They took me to a Mall that is much like a regular American Mall, except for a few things.
They wanted me to eat every kind of food they could imagine, so I actually spent most of the week eating whenever I wasn’t teaching. After we ate lunch, they took me to go see a Buddhist Temple on a hill. It has the biggest bronze statue in the world of a god that I think is called something like “Look-See”.
So I started climbing the long winding path up to the temple through all the souvenir shops that literally created a tunnel all the way up the hill. The weather was like Oklahoma in August.
Every once in a while I would turn around and find that I had left the Penangers, somewhere down the hill through the maze of souvenir shops. — It wasn’t that they had stopped to shop. They just weren’t in very good shape. They were all as thin as a rail, (unlike me, who has the distinguished look of a miniature Buddha or Alfred Hitchcock, or both), but they were not in very good shape.
The last leg of the journey, they insisted on taking a cable car. So we did. We came to a temple where it was packed with people all kneeling and praying with a big pile of shoes outside. There were monks inside praying real loud and it reminded me of watching Kung Fu, because the monks were wearing robes just like the monks in Kung Fu.
The team tried to take me to see the temple where there was a statue of “Sleeping Buddha”, but it was closed. Across the street from that temple there was another temple, and when we went in it there was a monk sitting on a chair to one side of a very tall statue of some god that I don’t know…
So I went over to him and asked him what was the significance of taking off your shoes when you entered the temple. He was a Burmese Buddhist monk, and knew very little English, so after waving my arms around and talking real slow, and making gestures like I would think Kwai Chang Caine would make, I finally gave up trying to find out, though I think by what he tried to tell me in the language of a Burmese Buddhist monk, I think he said that it was to keep the floor clean.
When people drive in Malaysia, it is quite different than driving in the U.S. For instance: They drive on the wrong side of the road like England… So, they were probably an English Colony at some time or other.
The other peculiar thing they do, is that the lines that distinguish between one lane and another lane does not have the same meaning as it does in the U.S.. I think in Malaysia, the dashed lines in the middle of the road is more of a “suggested” boundary that can be ignored whenever you want.
So, even though you are traveling down the road in one lane, it doesn’t mean that two other cars may not decide to come up right alongside you in the same lane at the same time, while a string of little motorcycles go weaving back and forth between the cars. — The whole act of driving reminded me of a large flock of birds all flying in a whirl, but not running into each other.
I think in Malaysia, they drive more by instinct than we do in the U.S. — Oh. They have accidents. I think I counted three that I saw just on the way to the office and back.
When you get a ticket for doing something wrong, you can usually just give the police some money to go buy coffee and they will let you go. One guy I was with did get pulled over, because I think it was lunch time and the Police needed some extra cash to go out to lunch. – Pretty weird, huh?
So, my entire week was spent eating, teaching and being driven around the island (Penang is on an island, just off the coast of Malaysia). I ate every kind of Asian food they could find. Most of which I can’t pronounce.
One guy (let’s call him Farid, because that is what everyone else calls him, because, well, that’s his name), asked me if I felt nervous when Soo Yuen was driving. I told him that after the first day, I just realized that everything was in God’s hands at this point, and I would just let him take care of me, so I didn’t have to worry about it.
I gave the team I was teaching the Elvis wand and showed them how to use it correctly. Now Farid has it sticking up above his cubicle so that the whole team can feel blessed by Elvis’s presence when they have a difficult issue they are trying to resolve.
So, now I’m on my way home. I will try to send this e-mail to you guys sometime on Saturday, if I remember, or I might just continue it on my way to Boston on Sunday morning. — I will be back from there next Wednesday.
While I was in Penang I went to the website of my High School and found a few of my friends from my High School and grade school days in Columbia Missouri, so I’ll try to remember to include them on this e-mail as well. They haven’t seen me since High School and don’t have a clue what I’ve been doing with my life, so this can help fill them in.
From what I gather, one guy named Tim (Knight) is a brain expert in Washington State (so I should probably call him Doctor Tim — Like I sometimes refer to my friend Jesse as Doctor Jesse — “come get your Chili!!”), another guy also named Tim (Collins) is in Florida working on a SWAT team at the Kennedy Space Center. How cool is that?
Boy. I never realized how much trouble those astronauts were causing down there. Matt Tapley, my other friend just happens to be getting his Masters in Math down here in AUSTIN!!!! Isn’t that neat?
So, by the way…. I am sending this letter to my friends at my previous job where I worked for 20 years. 18 of those years as an electrician. Sooner Plant is a large coal-fired plant that makes Electricity for the folks in Oklahoma (I said that for the benefit of my “old” friends that don’t understand why I was calling you “Sooner Plantians” at the beginning of this e-mail).
By the way, I include Mark Schlemper and Brent Stewart on these e-mails. They are in Columbia still. And a couple of other people here and there that you know, and some that you don’t. — But they know who they are. — I hope.
Some lady just came up to me while I was sitting here typing this letter and told me that if I have a long wait in this airport (which is more like a shopping mall than an airport), then they actually have a free tour of Singapore while you wait.
Well. I better start making my way toward my gate. I won’t have time to stop and write when I’m in Los Angeles. I will barely have time to make it between flights. — I’ll let you know if I missed it when I finish this letter later…
————————————————————————————————————–
All right. To make a long story a bit longer, I’ll try to be brief for the rest of this letter…. (yeah… Like that is going to happen).
I made my flight just fine. I didn’t lose any bags, because I carry everything on the plane with me. I arrived back in Austin around 11 pm, and was home by midnight. I slept most of the next day and had to get up around 3 in the morning to get to the airport to catch my flight to Boston to attend a Kronos Tech Summit where I was a guest speaker.
I spoke to 350 engineers that developed their Timekeeping application. I talked for two hours to them, and then they came up to me after it was over to ask me a bunch of questions. Then the following day (which was a Tuesday), I flew back home.
Because it took me so long to write the last part of this letter, I might as well continue…. I knew I couldn’t keep this short….
Last week, (April 3), three of us on our team drove up to Dallas to accept an award from Kronos for “Best Practices”. We spoke to over 250 people about how Dell uses Kronos and why we are so good. They gave us a big award and then I met with people from all sorts of companies (including the Oklahoma State Government) that wanted to know more about how we did this or that with Kronos. Then we drove back home (on April 4).
My wife was wondering why my voice was so hoarse when I returned from my trip to Dallas. I told her that my voice became hoarse while I was listening to the guy that was driving the car tell stories all the way to Dallas and back….. — Yeah. Right…. She didn’t believe it either.
Needless to say. My friends in the car (as Ed Shiever can testify), now knows a lot more about you than you know about him. — Specifically, they know a lot more about Walt Oswalt than anyone else at the plant, because by the time we made it to Dallas (about 2 1/2 hours later), I was just about done telling stories about Walt.
Three times I had to grab the steering wheel because the car was swerving off of I-35 while Stephen (that’s the guy that was driving), was laughing so hard he couldn’t stay on the road. — I have only started to introduce him to Bud Schoonover!!!!!
So, now I have finally filled you ‘all in on all I have been doing the past month. It has been real crazy. I hope things will finally settle down now so that I can catch up with the 3,000 e-mails I have in my Inbox!!!!
I hope to hear from you soon.
Your friend,
Kevin James Anthony Breazile
Power Plant Men 
Kidney stones are evil. I’ve had some, but none since 2009. The one change I made was to drink lots of water. I try to drink at least a half a gallon every day. The clearer your urine the better.
Yes Kev I was there and remember it well. Not that you moaned and groaned but when you set up straight in your seat and had a look on your face like. . .something was terribly wrong.
I offered to drive you home but you assured me you would be ok driving home. I did bum a ride with someone at Bill’s corner to work.
Ouch…
Wise advice for dealing with pain or anything negatively stressful. Not sure all are equally equipped to follow it, though. One of these days, maybe they’ll find a means for rebalancing the chemistry for you…
This is incredible! I was just talking tonight to another operator at work about passing kidney stones, I have only had two, one was when I was rolling up Valmy 1 steam turbine as a Control Room Operator, I had just started rolling and felt that familiar unmistakable pain, I turned the unit over to my assistant, went & peed out a potato shaped kidney stone about 1/2 the size of a pea & then finished putting the unit online! (Actually the concentration of bringing the unit on, mercifully helped give me something else to think about besides my pain)
Anyway Kevin, this is how I got rid of them. I started taking MAGNESIUM, a small dosage every day, it binds with the calcium & you urinate it out before it can form into a stone, works for me, I haven’t had one in twenty years now. If I feel that familiar pain in my back I know it’s because I’ve neglected taking my magnesium, so I double up for 2 or 3 days & problem solved.
I recommend stopping the calcium & taking the lowest dose magnesium you can get at the vitamin shop & see if the stones don’t stop for good. Take it from a fellow power plant man, kidney stone sufferer, and friend of Jesus 🙂
P.S. I don’t get a chance to read these every day you send them out, the best I can do is save them up & read them at work when I have the time, so I am usually far FAR behind your most recent posts, but I really enjoy them.
Wow. You’re very brave! My first thought was, like one of the last commenters-drink about a half gallon + a day, but I’d suggest distilled. Most of the ‘water stores’ where you fill your 5 gallon jugs will offer RO (reverse osmosis ) which still has some minerals, and straight up distilled water.
I drink the distilled like that, (it does taste a little flat, but you get used to it) because according to the ‘experts’ the lack of minerals makes your kidneys work far less hard as the water passes through (no accumulation of minerals possible from it) plus your body really benefits from all the direct and useable hydration….
Wonder if the electrical fields contributed to your condition as well?
Be well, my friend! Thinking of you, for sure!