Wayne Griffith and the Power Plant Computer Club
Favorites Post #12 (posted in no particular order)
Originally posted February 1, 2014:
I don’t normally start a post by talking about myself. I usually reserve that for side stories. But today was very unusual. I work at Dell, and today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that decided to take a Voluntary Separation Package. People I have known for the past 12 years will be leaving on Monday. The pain I feel from their departure has brought my mind back to a dear friend of mine who worked at the power plant many years ago. Wayne Griffith, a Labor Crew hand at the Power Plant.
I normally try to keep my posts down to around 2,000 words (which is long as blog posts go), so I won’t go into great detail about Wayne. That would take about 500 words for every pound that Wayne weighed. Which would result in a post 200,000 words long. You see. Wayne was a very large fellow. On the generous side, I would say, around 400 pounds. You can decide what I mean by generous.
When we first instituted a Confined Space Rescue Team at the Power Plant in 1994, when we were developing rescue plans for various confined spaces, we began with the premise… “How would we rescue Wayne Griffith from this confined space. If we could rescue him, everyone else would be a piece of cake. The trouble was that some confined spaces had hatchways that were only 18 inches by 12 inch ovals.
Oval Hatchway bigger than some at the power plant
We concluded that Wayne Griffith didn’t belong in a confined space to begin with. If we couldn’t wrap him up in a SKED stretcher and slide him through the portal, then he wouldn’t be able to enter the confined space in the first place.
A SKED stretcher can be wrapped around someone and cinched down to make them as narrow as possible, which by personal experience I know it also makes it hard to breath.
When I used to watch Wayne operate a Bobcat I wondered at how tightly packed he was as he sat bobbing about as he scooped up bottom ash, wandering back and forth between a dump truck and the bottom of the boiler.
This is the type of Bobcat Wayne Griffith used to operate
When I was young I used to watch cartoons that had a large construction hands that came to mind when I watched Wayne.
This bulldog sort of reminds me of Wayne. Only Wayne would have had a W on his hardhat
I know that some of you are cringing at my blatant and seeming disrespect for Wayne Griffith as I talk about how large he was. Well… This went without saying at the plant, and it does play a part in this story.
You see. One day, Wayne Griffith came into the electric shop where I was working and he said that he heard that we had a computer club and he wanted to join it. I told him that he had heard correctly. We had started a computer club where we shared software. It cost $5.00 to join, and the money was used to buy disk cases and freeware software. We also bought both 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and 3 1/2 inch floppy disks in bulk at a discount. We even bought low density 3 1/2 disks which were cheaper and punched out the extra hole automatically turning it into a large density disk.
You see. Back then (1987 and later), the low density 3 1/2 inch floppy had 720 Kb of data, while the high density disk had 1.44 Megabytes of data. Twice as much. The only difference was the extra hole in the disk case.
Notice that the high density disk has two holes and the low density disk has only one
I had bought a special square hole punch designed especially for turning low density disks into high density. So, we had very low cost disks at cost for all Computer Club members.
Wayne wanted to join the computer club, but he wasn’t looking for the same thing that most Power Plant Men were looking for, which was a library of games and educational software. He was looking for education all right. He wanted to learn how to use a computer.
You see. Christmas was coming up and Wayne wanted to buy a computer for his family. He had a couple of kids at home and it was important to him that they have a computer so they would be computer literate in school which would give them an extra edge. I told him I would teach him all about computers.
So, around October, Wayne purchased a computer through the company’s Computer Finance plan which allowed him to pay it off over time with deductions from his paycheck with no interest. A benefit that I often used myself.
Wayne brought the computer into the electric shop office and we set it up on a table next to the my Foreman, Andy Tubb’s desk.
This is an older computer than Wayne’s, He had a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive as well as a 5 1/4
Wayne would arrive at the electric shop each day at noon, and while Charles Foster and I ate our lunch with him, we walked Wayne through various programs to show him how to operate them. During that time, we covered Word Processors, Spreadsheets, like Lotus 123, and a couple of typing teacher programs (Mavis Beacon hadn’t showed up yet).
At this time we had purchased CDs with 1,000s of freeware programs on them. Freeware was something that you could use without paying for the application. If you really liked it you could donate something to the author. If you wanted something even better, you could send some money to the author and they would send you an upgraded version. Like I said. One CD had over 1,000 applications on it. Many of them were games. Some were business programs, some were computer utilities. Some were even programming languages.
We noticed right away that Wayne had one peculiar problem when learning how to type. His little pinky was about the size of my thumb. This meant that the size of his thumb was very large.
The Thumb Thing game has a thumb about the size of Wayne’s thumb
With such large fingers, it was almost impossible for Wayne to type. At best, he could hit one key at a time when he was using only his pinky. It was difficult for his pointer finger to type only one key at a time. My grandfather would have had the same problem. Actually, a lot of farmers have this problem. They have hands the size of Paul Bunyan.
Like this Paul Bunyan Actually, this is a historian named Wayne Chamberlain. Not Wayne Griffith
Even though Wayne had to pay extra attention learning how to type, he remained steadfast. Each day, he would come into the shop, and instead of eating his lunch, he would start pecking away at the computer. He was never discouraged. Each day I had a different lesson or a different program to show him.
For a month and a half we walked through all the different things that he would show his children on Christmas Day as if it was a script. We covered every point he needed to know. From taking the computer out of the box and hooking it up to running each program. This was long before the Internet and even before Windows had come along, though he did have a mouse.
By the time Wayne boxed up the computer and took it home and hid it in the closet to wait for Christmas morning to arrive, he had learned more about how to operate a computer than about 95% of the people at the power plant. I relished the idea that Wayne Griffith, the overweight labor crew hand that others may have thought didn’t have a thought in his mind other than to operate a piece of heavy equipment, was a computer whiz in disguise.
He came back after Christmas and told me that his two kids were really excited about their new computer and were enjoying the programs that we had installed on it. He was having them learn how to type using the Typing Teacher programs. I could tell that he was proud to have been able to demonstrate to his children that he knew how to operate something as sophisticated as a Personal Computer.
You have to remember. Back then, kids didn’t grow up with computers in their house. They were still a kind of a novelty. At the time, Charles Foster, Terry Blevins and I were the only people in the electric shop that had personal computers. Most of the plant wouldn’t have thought about having one until the Internet was readily accessible.
Nothing made me happier than to think about the large figure of Wayne taking the computer out of the box and setting it on their new computer desk and hooking it up and saying, “Now Janelle and Amanda, Here is how you turn this on. Here is how you learn how to type.” I can see his wife Kathy standing back very impressed that her husband knows so much about something so technical.
I know what it’s like to be extremely overweight. I am slightly overweight myself, but my mom is a very large woman. People automatically think two things. They think that you must eat a disgusting amount of food and they believe that it is the person’s fault that they are overweight. They also believe that since you are so large, you must not be very intelligent. I don’t know why exactly. It just seems that way.
The truth about overweight people is that it usually comes down to their metabolism. My grandmother (who is 100 years old), can eat my mother under the table. Yet she remains relatively thin while my mother eats a normal amount of food and weighs well over 300 pounds. I felt that this was the case with Wayne. He had a metabolism that just stored fat. I know that his sisters had the same condition. You would think that with today’s medical technology, a person’s metabolism would be easily balanced.
When you hear Wayne Griffith speak for the first time, it takes you by surprise. Here is this very large man who has trouble climbing in and out of the pickup truck. He is obviously very strong. At the same time, you may think that if he had a mind to, he could take his enormous fist and clonk you on the head and drive you right down into the ground. When you first hear his voice, you may be surprised to hear the voice of a very kind and gentle person. If you were to hear him on the phone you would think you were talking to the most kind person you could imagine.
One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching Wayne how to use the computer so much was because I really enjoyed his company. Wayne Griffith was a true Power Plant Man. He had his priorities straight. His main concern was for his family. He had thought months in advance what he wanted to do for his children at Christmas, and he knew that in order to pull it off it was going to take a tremendous amount of preparation.
It would have been easy to sit around after he bought the computer and just presented it to his children on Christmas morning and say, “Here’s your new computer! Play with it and see if you can figure out how it works.” Not Wayne. He wanted to be able to set them on their way to success by personally showing them how it worked.
So, why did I think about Wayne today? To tell you the truth, I was saving this story for my next Christmas story. It would have been perfect for that. As I said at the beginning of this post, today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that were leaving the company to work somewhere else. Some of them I have worked with for the past 12 1/2 years. This brought Wayne Griffith to mind.
I thought about Wayne because during the summer of 1994, when the plant encountered the second downsizing Wayne was let go along with a lot of other great Power Plant Men. I will talk about other friends during this year that were let go that year, but none that I felt so sad about as I did with Wayne Griffith.
Wayne probably never had a clue that I had cared about him so much. I never told him as much. I would just smile whenever I saw him as I did with all my other friends. Inside, I was putting my arm around him (well, halfway around him anyway) and giving him a true Power Plant Man Hug. As Bill Gibson would say, ” ‘Cause I Love You Man!”
Today, as far as I know, Wayne is still living in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. I don’t know what he’s up to, but if you are ever in the area and happen to see him. Give him a big (and I mean “Big”) hug from me.
Comments from the original post:
Wayne Griffith and the Power Plant Computer Club
Originally posted February 1, 2014:
I don’t normally start a post by talking about myself. I usually reserve that for side stories. But today was very unusual. I work at Dell, and today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that decided to take a Voluntary Separation Package. People I have known for the past 12 years will be leaving on Monday. The pain I feel from their departure has brought my mind back to a dear friend of mine who worked at the power plant many years ago. Wayne Griffith, a Labor Crew hand at the Power Plant.
I normally try to keep my posts down to around 2,000 words (which is long as blog posts go), so I won’t go into great detail about Wayne. That would take about 500 words for every pound that Wayne weighed. Which would result in a post 200,000 words long. You see. Wayne was a very large fellow. On the generous side, I would say, around 400 pounds. You can decide what I mean by generous.
When we first instituted a Confined Space Rescue Team at the Power Plant in 1994, when we were developing rescue plans for various confined spaces, we began with the premise… “How would we rescue Wayne Griffith from this confined space. If we could rescue him, everyone else would be a piece of cake. The trouble was that some confined spaces had hatchways that were only 18 inches by 12 inch ovals.
Oval Hatchway bigger than some at the power plant
We concluded that Wayne Griffith didn’t belong in a confined space to begin with. If we couldn’t wrap him up in a SKED stretcher and slide him through the portal, then he wouldn’t be able to enter the confined space in the first place.
A SKED stretcher can be wrapped around someone and cinched down to make them as narrow as possible, which by personal experience I know it also makes it hard to breath.
When I used to watch Wayne operate a Bobcat I wondered at how tightly packed he was as he sat bobbing about as he scooped up bottom ash, wandering back and forth between a dump truck and the bottom of the boiler.
This is the type of Bobcat Wayne Griffith used to operate
When I was young I used to watch cartoons that had a large construction hands that came to mind when I watched Wayne.
This bulldog sort of reminds me of Wayne. Only Wayne would have had a W on his hardhat
I know that some of you are cringing at my blatant and seeming disrespect for Wayne Griffith as I talk about how large he was. Well… This went without saying at the plant, and it does play a part in this story.
You see. One day, Wayne Griffith came into the electric shop where I was working and he said that he heard that we had a computer club and he wanted to join it. I told him that he had heard correctly. We had started a computer club where we shared software. It cost $5.00 to join, and the money was used to buy disk cases and freeware software. We also bought both 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and 3 1/2 inch floppy disks in bulk at a discount. We even bought low density 3 1/2 disks which were cheaper and punched out the extra hole automatically turning it into a large density disk.
You see. Back then (1987 and later), the low density 3 1/2 inch floppy had 720 Kb of data, while the high density disk had 1.44 Megabytes of data. Twice as much. The only difference was the extra hole in the disk case.
Notice that the high density disk has two holes and the low density disk has only one
I had bought a special square hole punch designed especially for turning low density disks into high density. So, we had very low cost disks at cost for all Computer Club members.
Wayne wanted to join the computer club, but he wasn’t looking for the same thing that most Power Plant Men were looking for, which was a library of games and educational software. He was looking for education all right. He wanted to learn how to use a computer.
You see. Christmas was coming up and Wayne wanted to buy a computer for his family. He had a couple of kids at home and it was important to him that they have a computer so they would be computer literate in school which would give them an extra edge. I told him I would teach him all about computers.
So, around October, Wayne purchased a computer through the company’s Computer Finance plan which allowed him to pay it off over time with deductions from his paycheck with no interest. A benefit that I often used myself.
Wayne brought the computer into the electric shop office and we set it up on a table next to the my Foreman, Andy Tubb’s desk.
This is an older computer than Wayne’s, He had a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive as well as a 5 1/4
Wayne would arrive at the electric shop each day at noon, and while Charles Foster and I ate our lunch with him, we walked Wayne through various programs to show him how to operate them. During that time, we covered Word Processors, Spreadsheets, like Lotus 123, and a couple of typing teacher programs (Mavis Beacon hadn’t showed up yet).
At this time we had purchased CDs with 1,000s of freeware programs on them. Freeware was something that you could use without paying for the application. If you really liked it you could donate something to the author. If you wanted something even better, you could send some money to the author and they would send you an upgraded version. Like I said. One CD had over 1,000 applications on it. Many of them were games. Some were business programs, some were computer utilities. Some were even programming languages.
We noticed right away that Wayne had one peculiar problem when learning how to type. His little pinky was about the size of my thumb. This meant that the size of his thumb was very large.
The Thumb Thing game has a thumb about the size of Wayne’s thumb
With such large fingers, it was almost impossible for Wayne to type. At best, he could hit one key at a time when he was using only his pinky. It was difficult for his pointer finger to type only one key at a time. My grandfather would have had the same problem. Actually, a lot of farmers have this problem. They have hands the size of Paul Bunyan.
Like this Paul Bunyan Actually, this is a historian named Wayne Chamberlain. Not Wayne Griffith
Even though Wayne had to pay extra attention learning how to type, he remained steadfast. Each day, he would come into the shop, and instead of eating his lunch, he would start pecking away at the computer. He was never discouraged. Each day I had a different lesson or a different program to show him.
For a month and a half we walked through all the different things that he would show his children on Christmas Day as if it was a script. We covered every point he needed to know. From taking the computer out of the box and hooking it up to running each program. This was long before the Internet and even before Windows had come along, though he did have a mouse.
By the time Wayne boxed up the computer and took it home and hid it in the closet to wait for Christmas morning to arrive, he had learned more about how to operate a computer than about 95% of the people at the power plant. I relished the idea that Wayne Griffith, the overweight labor crew hand that others may have thought didn’t have a thought in his mind other than to operate a piece of heavy equipment, was a computer whiz in disguise.
He came back after Christmas and told me that his two kids were really excited about their new computer and were enjoying the programs that we had installed on it. He was having them learn how to type using the Typing Teacher programs. I could tell that he was proud to have been able to demonstrate to his children that he knew how to operate something as sophisticated as a Personal Computer.
You have to remember. Back then, kids didn’t grow up with computers in their house. They were still a kind of a novelty. At the time, Charles Foster, Terry Blevins and I were the only people in the electric shop that had personal computers. Most of the plant wouldn’t have thought about having one until the Internet was readily accessible.
Nothing made me happier than to think about the large figure of Wayne taking the computer out of the box and setting it on their new computer desk and hooking it up and saying, “Now Janelle and Amanda, Here is how you turn this on. Here is how you learn how to type.” I can see his wife Kathy standing back very impressed that her husband knows so much about something so technical.
I know what it’s like to be extremely overweight. I am slightly overweight myself, but my mom is a very large woman. People automatically think two things. They think that you must eat a disgusting amount of food and they believe that it is the person’s fault that they are overweight. They also believe that since you are so large, you must not be very intelligent. I don’t know why exactly. It just seems that way.
The truth about overweight people is that it usually comes down to their metabolism. My grandmother (who is 100 years old), can eat my mother under the table. Yet she remains relatively thin while my mother eats a normal amount of food and weighs well over 300 pounds. I felt that this was the case with Wayne. He had a metabolism that just stored fat. I know that his sisters had the same condition. You would think that with today’s medical technology, a person’s metabolism would be easily balanced.
When you hear Wayne Griffith speak for the first time, it takes you by surprise. Here is this very large man who has trouble climbing in and out of the pickup truck. He is obviously very strong. At the same time, you may think that if he had a mind to, he could take his enormous fist and clonk you on the head and drive you right down into the ground. When you first hear his voice, you may be surprised to hear the voice of a very kind and gentle person. If you were to hear him on the phone you would think you were talking to the most kind person you could imagine.
One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching Wayne how to use the computer so much was because I really enjoyed his company. Wayne Griffith was a true Power Plant Man. He had his priorities straight. His main concern was for his family. He had thought months in advance what he wanted to do for his children at Christmas, and he knew that in order to pull it off it was going to take a tremendous amount of preparation.
It would have been easy to sit around after he bought the computer and just presented it to his children on Christmas morning and say, “Here’s your new computer! Play with it and see if you can figure out how it works.” Not Wayne. He wanted to be able to set them on their way to success by personally showing them how it worked.
So, why did I think about Wayne today? To tell you the truth, I was saving this story for my next Christmas story. It would have been perfect for that. As I said at the beginning of this post, today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that were leaving the company to work somewhere else. Some of them I have worked with for the past 12 1/2 years. This brought Wayne Griffith to mind.
I thought about Wayne because during the summer of 1994, when the plant encountered the second downsizing Wayne was let go along with a lot of other great Power Plant Men. I will talk about other friends during this year that were let go that year, but none that I felt so sad about as I did with Wayne Griffith.
Wayne probably never had a clue that I had cared about him so much. I never told him as much. I would just smile whenever I saw him as I did with all my other friends. Inside, I was putting my arm around him (well, halfway around him anyway) and giving him a true Power Plant Man Hug. As Bill Gibson would say, ” ‘Cause I Love You Man!”
Today, as far as I know, Wayne is still living in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. I don’t know what he’s up to, but if you are ever in the area and happen to see him. Give him a big (and I mean “Big”) hug from me.
Comments from the original post:
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Awww. A great story. Sorry about the job closure. Nice story about Wayne. I do hope he was able to find work too. It always hurts the nicest, hardest-working people…lay-offs and closures. I know. I have been off over 2 years. I have lots of certifications, a degree, and am highly skilled; yet no prospects. We can hope and pray it gets better. I don’t know.
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Thanks! Great story. When I read it I could still hear Gibson saying “I love ya man”.
Lay-offs are tough. Nothing good about them. I believe it was easier losing my own job than having to tell a “Wayne Griffith” he was losing his.
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.
Wayne Griffith and the Power Plant Computer Club
Originally posted February 1, 2014:
I don’t normally start a post by talking about myself. I usually reserve that for side stories. But today was very unusual. I work at Dell, and today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that decided to take a Voluntary Separation Package. People I have known for the past 12 years will be leaving on Monday. The pain I feel from their departure has brought my mind back to a dear friend of mine who worked at the power plant many years ago. Wayne Griffith, a Labor Crew hand at the Power Plant.
I normally try to keep my posts down to around 2,000 words (which is long as blog posts go), so I won’t go into great detail about Wayne. That would take about 500 words for every pound that Wayne weighed. Which would result in a post 200,000 words long. You see. Wayne was a very large fellow. On the generous side, I would say, around 400 pounds. You can decide what I mean by generous.
When we first instituted a Confined Space Rescue Team at the Power Plant in 1994, when we were developing rescue plans for various confined spaces, we began with the premise… “How would we rescue Wayne Griffith from this confined space. If we could rescue him, everyone else would be a piece of cake. The trouble was that some confined spaces had hatchways that were only 18 inches by 12 inch ovals.
Oval Hatchway bigger than some at the power plant
We concluded that Wayne Griffith didn’t belong in a confined space to begin with. If we couldn’t wrap him up in a SKED stretcher and slide him through the portal, then he wouldn’t be able to enter the confined space in the first place.
A SKED stretcher can be wrapped around someone and cinched down to make them as narrow as possible, which by personal experience I know it also makes it hard to breath.
When I used to watch Wayne operate a Bobcat I wondered at how tightly packed he was as he sat bobbing about as he scooped up bottom ash, wandering back and forth between a dump truck and the bottom of the boiler.
This is the type of Bobcat Wayne Griffith used to operate
When I was young I used to watch cartoons that had a large construction hands that came to mind when I watched Wayne.
This bulldog sort of reminds me of Wayne. Only Wayne would have had a W on his hardhat
I know that some of you are cringing at my blatant and seeming disrespect for Wayne Griffith as I talk about how large he was. Well… This went without saying at the plant, and it does play a part in this story.
You see. One day, Wayne Griffith came into the electric shop where I was working and he said that he heard that we had a computer club and he wanted to join it. I told him that he had heard correctly. We had started a computer club where we shared software. It cost $5.00 to join, and the money was used to buy disk cases and freeware software. We also bought both 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and 3 1/2 inch floppy disks in bulk at a discount. We even bought low density 3 1/2 disks which were cheaper and punched out the extra hole automatically turning it into a large density disk.
You see. Back then (1987 and later), the low density 3 1/2 inch floppy had 720 Kb of data, while the high density disk had 1.44 Megabytes of data. Twice as much. The only difference was the extra hole in the disk case.
Notice that the high density disk has two holes and the low density disk has only one
I had bought a special square hole punch designed especially for turning low density disks into high density. So, we had very low cost disks at cost for all Computer Club members.
Wayne wanted to join the computer club, but he wasn’t looking for the same thing that most Power Plant Men were looking for, which was a library of games and educational software. He was looking for education all right. He wanted to learn how to use a computer.
You see. Christmas was coming up and Wayne wanted to buy a computer for his family. He had a couple of kids at home and it was important to him that they have a computer so they would be computer literate in school which would give them an extra edge. I told him I would teach him all about computers.
So, around October, Wayne purchased a computer through the company’s Computer Finance plan which allowed him to pay it off over time with deductions from his paycheck with no interest. A benefit that I often used myself.
Wayne brought the computer into the electric shop office and we set it up on a table next to the my Foreman, Andy Tubb’s desk.
This is an older computer than Wayne’s, He had a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive as well as a 5 1/4
Wayne would arrive at the electric shop each day at noon, and while Charles Foster and I ate our lunch with him, we walked Wayne through various programs to show him how to operate them. During that time, we covered Word Processors, Spreadsheets, like Lotus 123, and a couple of typing teacher programs (Mavis Beacon hadn’t showed up yet).
At this time we had purchased CDs with 1,000s of freeware programs on them. Freeware was something that you could use without paying for the application. If you really liked it you could donate something to the author. If you wanted something even better, you could send some money to the author and they would send you an upgraded version. Like I said. One CD had over 1,000 applications on it. Many of them were games. Some were business programs, some were computer utilities. Some were even programming languages.
We noticed right away that Wayne had one peculiar problem when learning how to type. His little pinky was about the size of my thumb. This meant that the size of his thumb was very large.
The Thumb Thing game has a thumb about the size of Wayne’s thumb
With such large fingers, it was almost impossible for Wayne to type. At best, he could hit one key at a time when he was using only his pinky. It was difficult for his pointer finger to type only one key at a time. My grandfather would have had the same problem. Actually, a lot of farmers have this problem. They have hands the size of Paul Bunyan.
Like this Paul Bunyan Actually, this is a historian named Wayne Chamberlain. Not Wayne Griffith
Even though Wayne had to pay extra attention learning how to type, he remained steadfast. Each day, he would come into the shop, and instead of eating his lunch, he would start pecking away at the computer. He was never discouraged. Each day I had a different lesson or a different program to show him.
For a month and a half we walked through all the different things that he would show his children on Christmas Day as if it was a script. We covered every point he needed to know. From taking the computer out of the box and hooking it up to running each program. This was long before the Internet and even before Windows had come along, though he did have a mouse.
By the time Wayne boxed up the computer and took it home and hid it in the closet to wait for Christmas morning to arrive, he had learned more about how to operate a computer than about 95% of the people at the power plant. I relished the idea that Wayne Griffith, the overweight labor crew hand that others may have thought didn’t have a thought in his mind other than to operate a piece of heavy equipment, was a computer whiz in disguise.
He came back after Christmas and told me that his two kids were really excited about their new computer and were enjoying the programs that we had installed on it. He was having them learn how to type using the Typing Teacher programs. I could tell that he was proud to have been able to demonstrate to his children that he knew how to operate something as sophisticated as a Personal Computer.
You have to remember. Back then, kids didn’t grow up with computers in their house. They were still a kind of a novelty. At the time, Charles Foster, Terry Blevins and I were the only people in the electric shop that had personal computers. Most of the plant wouldn’t have thought about having one until the Internet was readily accessible.
Nothing made me happier than to think about the large figure of Wayne taking the computer out of the box and setting it on their new computer desk and hooking it up and saying, “Now Janelle and Amanda, Here is how you turn this on. Here is how you learn how to type.” I can see his wife Kathy standing back very impressed that her husband knows so much about something so technical.
I know what it’s like to be extremely overweight. I am slightly overweight myself, but my mom is a very large woman. People automatically think two things. They think that you must eat a disgusting amount of food and they believe that it is the person’s fault that they are overweight. They also believe that since you are so large, you must not be very intelligent. I don’t know why exactly. It just seems that way.
The truth about overweight people is that it usually comes down to their metabolism. My grandmother (who is 100 years old), can eat my mother under the table. Yet she remains relatively thin while my mother eats a normal amount of food and weighs well over 300 pounds. I felt that this was the case with Wayne. He had a metabolism that just stored fat. I know that his sisters had the same condition. You would think that with today’s medical technology, a person’s metabolism would be easily balanced.
When you hear Wayne Griffith speak for the first time, it takes you by surprise. Here is this very large man who has trouble climbing in and out of the pickup truck. He is obviously very strong. At the same time, you may think that if he had a mind to, he could take his enormous fist and clonk you on the head and drive you right down into the ground. When you first hear his voice, you may be surprised to hear the voice of a very kind and gentle person. If you were to hear him on the phone you would think you were talking to the most kind person you could imagine.
One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching Wayne how to use the computer so much was because I really enjoyed his company. Wayne Griffith was a true Power Plant Man. He had his priorities straight. His main concern was for his family. He had thought months in advance what he wanted to do for his children at Christmas, and he knew that in order to pull it off it was going to take a tremendous amount of preparation.
It would have been easy to sit around after he bought the computer and just presented it to his children on Christmas morning and say, “Here’s your new computer! Play with it and see if you can figure out how it works.” Not Wayne. He wanted to be able to set them on their way to success by personally showing them how it worked.
So, why did I think about Wayne today? To tell you the truth, I was saving this story for my next Christmas story. It would have been perfect for that. As I said at the beginning of this post, today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that were leaving the company to work somewhere else. Some of them I have worked with for the past 12 1/2 years. This brought Wayne Griffith to mind.
I thought about Wayne because during the summer of 1994, when the plant encountered the second downsizing Wayne was let go along with a lot of other great Power Plant Men. I will talk about other friends during this year that were let go that year, but none that I felt so sad about as I did with Wayne Griffith.
Wayne probably never had a clue that I had cared about him so much. I never told him as much. I would just smile whenever I saw him as I did with all my other friends. Inside, I was putting my arm around him (well, halfway around him anyway) and giving him a true Power Plant Man Hug. As Bill Gibson would say, ” ‘Cause I Love You Man!”
Today, as far as I know, Wayne is still living in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. I don’t know what he’s up to, but if you are ever in the area and happen to see him. Give him a big (and I mean “Big”) hug from me.
Comments from the original post:
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Awww. A great story. Sorry about the job closure. Nice story about Wayne. I do hope he was able to find work too. It always hurts the nicest, hardest-working people…lay-offs and closures. I know. I have been off over 2 years. I have lots of certifications, a degree, and am highly skilled; yet no prospects. We can hope and pray it gets better. I don’t know.
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Thanks! Great story. When I read it I could still hear Gibson saying “I love ya man”.
Lay-offs are tough. Nothing good about them. I believe it was easier losing my own job than having to tell a “Wayne Griffith” he was losing his.
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.
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.
Wayne Griffith and the Power Plant Computer Club
Originally posted February 1, 2014:
I don’t normally start a post by talking about myself. I usually reserve that for side stories. But today was very unusual. I work at Dell, and today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that decided to take a Voluntary Separation Package. People I have known for the past 12 years will be leaving on Monday. The pain I feel from their departure has brought my mind back to a dear friend of mine who worked at the power plant many years ago. Wayne Griffith, a Labor Crew hand at the Power Plant.
I normally try to keep my posts down to around 2,000 words (which is long as blog post go), so I won’t go into great detail about Wayne. That would take about 500 words for every pound that Wayne weighed. Which would result in a post 200,000 words long. You see. Wayne was a very large fellow. On the generous side, I would say, around 400 p0unds. You can decide what I mean by generous.
When we first instituted a Confined Space Rescue Team at the Power Plant in 1994, when we were developing rescue plans for various confined spaces, we began with the premise… “How would we rescue Wayne Griffith from this confined space. If we could rescue him, everyone else would be a piece of cake. The trouble was that some confined spaces had hatchways that were only 18 inches by 12 inch ovals.
Oval Hatchway bigger than some at the power plant
We concluded that Wayne Griffith didn’t belong in a confined space to begin with. If we couldn’t wrap him up in a SKED stretcher and slide him through the portal, then he wouldn’t be able to enter the confined space in the first place.
A SKED stretcher can be wrapped around someone and cinched down to make them as narrow as possible.
When I used to watch Wayne operate a Bobcat I wondered at how tightly packed he was as he sat bobbing about as he scooped up bottom ash, wandering back and forth between a dump truck and the bottom of the boiler.
This is the type of Bobcat Wayne Griffith used to operate
When I was young I used to watch cartoons that had a large construction hands that came to mind when I watched Wayne.
This bulldog sort of reminds me of Wayne. Only Wayne would have had a W on his hardhat
I know that some of you are cringing at my blatant and seeming disrespect for Wayne Griffith as I talk about how large he was. Well… This went without saying at the plant, and it does play a part in this story.
You see. One day, Wayne Griffith came into the electric shop where I was working and he said that he heard that we had a computer club and he wanted to join it. I told him that he had heard correctly. We had started a computer club where we shared software. It cost $5.00 to join, and the money was used to buy disk cases and freeware software. We also bought both 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and 3 1/2 inch floppy disks in bulk at a discount. We even bought low density 3 1/2 disks which were cheaper and punched out the extra hole automatically turning it into a large density disk.
You see. Back then (1987 and later), the low density 3 1/2 inch floppy had 720 Kb of data, while the high density disk had 1.44 Megabytes of data. Twice as much. The only difference was the extra hole in the disk case.
Notice that the high density disk has two holes and the low density disk has only one
I had bought a special square hole punch designed especially for turning low density disks into high density. So, we had very low cost disks at cost for all Computer Club members.
Wayne wanted to join the computer club, but he wasn’t looking for the same thing that most Power Plant Men were looking for, which was a library of games and educational software. He was looking for education all right. He wanted to learn how to use a computer.
You see. Christmas was coming up and Wayne wanted to buy a computer for his family. He had a couple of kids at home and it was important to him that they have a computer so they would be computer literate in school which would give them an extra edge. I told him I would teach him all about computers.
So, around October, Wayne purchased a computer through the company’s Computer Finance plan which allowed him to pay it off over time with deductions from his paycheck with no interest. A benefit that I often used myself.
Wayne brought the computer into the electric shop office and we set it up on a table next to the my Foreman, Andy Tubb’s desk.
This is an older computer than Wayne’s, He had a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive as well as a 5 1/4
Wayne would arrive at the electric shop each day at noon, and while Charles Foster and I ate our lunch with him, we walked Wayne through various programs to show him how to operate them. During that time, we covered Word Processors, Spreadsheets, like Lotus 123, and a couple of typing teacher programs (Mavis Beacon hadn’t showed up yet).
At this time we had purchased CD with 1,000s of freeware programs on them. Freeware was something that you could use without paying for the application. If you really liked it you could donate something to the author. If you wanted something even better, you could send some money to the author and they would send you an upgraded version. Like I said. One CD had over 1,000 applications on it. Many of them were games. Some were business programs, some were computer utilities. Some were even programming languages.
We noticed right away that Wayne had one peculiar problem when learning how to type. His little pinky was about the size of my thumb. This meant that the size of his thumb was very large.
The Thumb Thing game has a thumb about the size of Wayne’s thumb
With such large fingers, it was almost impossible for Wayne to type. At best, he could hit one key at a time when he was using only his pinky. It was difficult for his pointer finger to type only one key at a time. My grandfather would have had the same problem. Actually, a lot of farmers have this problem. They have hands the size of Paul Bunyan.
Like this Paul Bunyan Actually, this is a historian named Wayne Chamberlain. Not Wayne Griffith
Even though Wayne had to pay extra attention learning how to type, he remained steadfast. Each day, he would come into the shop, and instead of eating his lunch, he would start pecking away at the computer. He was never discouraged. Each day I had a different lesson or a different program to show him.
For a month and a half we walked through all the different things that he would show his children on Christmas Day as if it was a script. We covered every point he needed to know. From taking the computer out of the box and hooking it up to running each program. This was long before then Internet and even before Windows had come along, though he did have a mouse.
By the time Wayne boxed up the computer and took it home and hid it in the closet to wait for Christmas morning to arrive, he had learned more about how to operate a computer than about 95% of the people at the power plant. I relished the idea that Wayne Griffith, the overweight labor crew hand that others may have thought didn’t have a thought in his mind other than to operate a piece of heavy equipment, was a computer whiz in disguise.
He came back after Christmas and told me that his two kids were really excited about their new computer and were enjoying the programs that we had installed on it. He was having them learn how to type using the Typing Teacher programs. I could tell that he was proud to have been able to demonstrate to his children that he knew how to operate something as sophisticated as a Personal Computer.
You have to remember. Back then, kids didn’t grow up with computers in their house. They were still a kind of a novelty. At the time, Charles Foster, Terry Blevins and I were the only people in the electric shop that had personal computers. Most of the plant wouldn’t have thought about having one until the Internet was readily accessible.
Nothing made me happier than to think about the large figure of Wayne taking the computer out of the box and setting it on their new computer desk and hooking it up and saying, “Now Janelle and Amanda, Here is how you turn this on. Here is how you learn how to type.” I can see his wife Kathy standing back very impressed that her husband knows so much about something so technical.
I know what it’s like to be extremely overweight. I am slightly overweight myself, but my mom is a very large woman. People automatically think two things. They think that you must eat a disgusting amount of food and they believe that it is the person’s fault that they are overweight. They also believe that since you are so large, you must not be very intelligent. I don’t know why exactly. It just seems that way.
The truth about overweight people is that it usually comes down to their metabolism. My grandmother (who is 100 years old), can eat my mother under the table. Yet she remains relatively thin while my mother eats a normal amount of food and weighs well over 300 pounds. I felt that this was the case with Wayne. He had a metabolism that just stored fat. I know that his sisters had the same condition. You would think that with today’s medical technology, a person’s metabolism would be easily balanced.
When you hear Wayne Griffith speak for the first time, it takes you by surprise. Here is this very large man who has trouble climbing in and out of the pickup truck. He is obviously very strong. At the same time, you may thing that if he had a mind to, he could take his enormous fist and clonk you on the head and drive you right down into the ground. When you first hear his voice, you may be surprised to hear the voice of a very kind and gentle person. If you were to hear him on the phone you would think you were talking to the most kind person you could imagine.
One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching Wayne how to use the computer so much was because I really enjoyed his company. Wayne Griffith was a true Power Plant Man. He had his priorities straight. His main concern was for his family. He had thought months in advance what he wanted to do for his children at Christmas, and he knew that in order to pull it off it was going to take a tremendous amount of preparation.
It would have been easy to sit around after he bought the computer and just presented it to his children on Christmas morning and say, “Here’s your new computer! Play with it and see if you can figure out how it works.” Not Wayne. He wanted to be able to set them on their way to success by personally showing them how it worked.
So, why did I think about Wayne today? To tell you the truth, I was saving this story for my next Christmas story. It would have been perfect for that. As I said at the beginning of this post, today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that were leaving the company to work somewhere else. Some of them I have worked with for the past 12 1/2 years. This brought Wayne Griffith to mind.
I thought about Wayne because during the summer of 1994, when the plant encountered the second downsizing Wayne was let go along with a lot of other great Power Plant Men. I will talk about other friends during this year that were let go that year, but none that I felt so sad about as I did when Wayne Griffith.
Wayne probably never had a clue that I had cared about him so much. I never told him as much. I would just smile whenever I saw him as I did with all my other friends. Inside, I was putting my arm around him (well, halfway around him anyway) and giving him a true Power Plant Man Hug. As Bill Gibson would say, ” ‘Cause I Love You Man!”
Today, as far as I know, Wayne is still living in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. I don’t know what he’s up to, but if you are ever in the area and happen to see him. Give him a big (and I mean “Big”) hug from me.
Comments from the original post:
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Awww. A great story. Sorry about the job closure. Nice story about Wayne. I do hope he was able to find work too. It always hurts the nicest, hardest-working people…lay-offs and closures. I know. I have been off over 2 years. I have lots of certifications, a degree, and am highly skilled; yet no prospects. We can hope and pray it gets better. I don’t know.
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Thanks! Great story. When I read it I could still hear Gibson saying “I love ya man”.
Lay-offs are tough. Nothing good about them. I believe it was easier losing my own job than having to tell a “Wayne Griffith” he was losing his.
Making Friends from Foes – A Tale of Power Plant Woes
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 1G10 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 1G10 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 1G10. 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.
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 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 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, 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
Wayne Griffith and the Power Plant Computer Club
I don’t normally start a post by talking about myself. I usually reserve that for side stories. But today was very unusual. I work at Dell, and today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that decided to take a Voluntary Separation Package. People I have known for the past 12 years will be leaving on Monday. The pain I feel from their departure has brought my mind back to a dear friend of mine who worked at the power plant many years ago. Wayne Griffith, a Labor Crew hand at the Power Plant.
I normally try to keep my posts down to around 2,000 words (which is long as blog post go), so I won’t go into great detail about Wayne. That would take about 500 words for every pound that Wayne weighed. Which would result in a post 200,000 words long. You see. Wayne was a very large fellow. On the generous side, I would say, around 400 pounds. You can decide what I mean by generous.
When we first instituted a Confined Space Rescue Team at the Power Plant in 1994, when we were developing rescue plans for various confined spaces, we began with the premise… “How would we rescue Wayne Griffith from this confined space. If we could rescue him, everyone else would be a piece of cake. The trouble was that some confined spaces had hatchways that were only 18 inches by 12 inch ovals.
Oval Hatchway bigger than some at the power plant
We concluded that Wayne Griffith didn’t belong in a confined space to begin with. If we couldn’t wrap him up in a SKED stretcher and slide him through the portal, then he wouldn’t be able to enter the confined space in the first place.
A SKED stretcher can be wrapped around someone and cinched down to make them as narrow as possible.
When I used to watch Wayne operate a Bobcat I wondered at how tightly packed he was as he sat bobbing about as he scooped up bottom ash, wandering back and forth between a dump truck and the bottom of the boiler.
This is the type of Bobcat Wayne Griffith used to operate
When I was young I used to watch cartoons that had a large construction hands that came to mind when I watched Wayne.
This bulldog sort of reminds me of Wayne. Only Wayne would have had a W on his hardhat
I know that some of you are cringing at my blatant and seeming disrespect for Wayne Griffith as I talk about how large he was. Well… This went without saying at the plant, and it does play a part in this story.
You see. One day, Wayne Griffith came into the electric shop where I was working and he said that he heard that we had a computer club and he wanted to join it. I told him that he had heard correctly. We had started a computer club where we shared software. It cost $5.00 to join, and the money was used to buy disk cases and freeware software. We also bought both 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and 3 1/2 inch floppy disks in bulk at a discount. We even bought low density 3 1/2 disks which were cheaper and punched out the extra hole automatically turning it into a large density disk.
You see. Back then (1987 and later), the low density 3 1/2 inch floppy had 720 Kb of data, while the high density disk had 1.44 Megabytes of data. Twice as much. The only difference was the extra hole in the disk case.
Notice that the high density disk has two holes and the low density disk has only one
I had bought a special square hole punch designed especially for turning low density disks into high density. So, we had very low cost disks at cost for all Computer Club members.
Wayne wanted to join the computer club, but he wasn’t looking for the same thing that most Power Plant Men were looking for, which was a library of games and educational software. He was looking for education all right. He wanted to learn how to use a computer.
You see. Christmas was coming up and Wayne wanted to buy a computer for his family. He had a couple of kids at home and it was important to him that they have a computer so they would be computer literate in school which would give them an extra edge. I told him I would teach him all about computers.
So, around October, Wayne purchased a computer through the company’s Computer Finance plan which allowed him to pay it off over time with deductions from his paycheck with no interest. A benefit that I often used myself.
Wayne brought the computer into the electric shop office and we set it up on a table next to the my Foreman, Andy Tubb’s desk.
This is an older computer than Wayne’s, He had a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive as well as a 5 1/4
Wayne would arrive at the electric shop each day at noon, and while Charles Foster and I ate our lunch with him, we walked Wayne through various programs to show him how to operate them. During that time, we covered Word Processors, Spreadsheets, like Lotus 123, and a couple of typing teacher programs (Mavis Beacon hadn’t showed up yet).
At this time we had purchased CDs with 1,000’s of freeware programs on them. Freeware was something that you could use without paying for the application. If you really liked it you could donate something to the author. If you wanted something even better, you could send some money to the author and they would send you an upgraded version. Like I said. One CD had over 1,000 applications on it. Many of them were games. Some were business programs, some were computer utilities. Some were even programming languages.
We noticed right away that Wayne had one peculiar problem when learning how to type. His little pinky was about the size of my thumb. This meant that the size of his thumb was very large.
The Thumb Thing game has a thumb about the size of Wayne’s thumb
With such large fingers, it was almost impossible for Wayne to type. At best, he could hit one key at a time when he was using only his pinky. It was difficult for his pointer finger to type only one key at a time. My grandfather would have had the same problem. Actually, a lot of farmers have this problem. They have hands the size of Paul Bunyan.
Like this Paul Bunyan Actually, this is a historian named Wayne Chamberlain. Not Wayne Griffith
Even though Wayne had to pay extra attention learning how to type, he remained steadfast. Each day, he would come into the shop, and instead of eating his lunch, he would start pecking away at the computer. He was never discouraged. Each day I had a different lesson or a different program to show him.
For a month and a half we walked through all the different things that he would show his children on Christmas Day as if it was a script. We covered every point he needed to know. From taking the computer out of the box and hooking it up to running each program. This was long before the Internet and even before Windows had come along, though he did have a mouse.
By the time Wayne boxed up the computer and took it home and hid it in the closet to wait for Christmas morning to arrive, he had learned more about how to operate a computer than about 95% of the people at the power plant. I relished the idea that Wayne Griffith, the overweight labor crew hand that others may have thought didn’t have a thought in his mind other than to operate a piece of heavy equipment, was a computer whiz in disguise.
He came back after Christmas and told me that his two kids were really excited about their new computer and were enjoying the programs that we had installed on it. He was having them learn how to type using the Typing Teacher programs. I could tell that he was proud to have been able to demonstrate to his children that he knew how to operate something as sophisticated as a Personal Computer.
You have to remember. Back then, kids didn’t grow up with computers in their house. They were still a kind of a novelty. At the time, Charles Foster, Terry Blevins and I were the only people in the electric shop that had personal computers. Most of the plant wouldn’t have thought about having one until the Internet was readily accessible.
Nothing made me happier than to think about the large figure of Wayne taking the computer out of the box and setting it on their new computer desk and hooking it up and saying, “Now Janelle and Amanda, Here is how you turn this on. Here is how you learn how to type.” I can see his wife Kathy standing back very impressed that her husband knows so much about something so technical.
I know what it’s like to be extremely overweight. I am slightly overweight myself, but my mom is a very large woman. People automatically think two things. They think that you must eat a disgusting amount of food and they believe that it is the person’s fault that they are overweight. They also believe that since you are so large, you must not be very intelligent. I don’t know why exactly. It just seems that way.
The truth about overweight people is that it usually comes down to their metabolism. My grandmother (who is 100 years old), can eat my mother under the table. Yet she remains relatively thin while my mother eats a normal amount of food and weighs well over 300 pounds. I felt that this was the case with Wayne. He had a metabolism that just stored fat. I know that his sisters had the same condition. You would think that with today’s medical technology, a person’s metabolism would be easily balanced.
When you hear Wayne Griffith speak for the first time, it takes you by surprise. Here is this very large man who has trouble climbing in and out of the pickup truck. He is obviously very strong. At the same time, you may thing that if he had a mind to, he could take his enormous fist and clonk you on the head and drive you right down into the ground. When you first hear his voice, you may be surprised to hear the voice of a very kind and gentle person. If you were to hear him on the phone you would think you were talking to the most kind person you could imagine.
One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching Wayne how to use the computer so much was because I really enjoyed his company. Wayne Griffith was a true Power Plant Man. He had his priorities straight. His main concern was for his family. He had thought months in advance what he wanted to do for his children at Christmas, and he knew that in order to pull it off it was going to take a tremendous amount of preparation.
It would have been easy to sit around after he bought the computer and just presented it to his children on Christmas morning and say, “Here’s your new computer! Play with it and see if you can figure out how it works.” Not Wayne. He wanted to be able to set them on their way to success by personally showing them how it worked.
So, why did I think about Wayne today? To tell you the truth, I was saving this story for my next Christmas story. It would have been perfect for that. As I said at the beginning of this post, today I said goodbye to a lot of friends that were leaving the company to work somewhere else. Some of them I have worked with for the past 12 1/2 years. This brought Wayne Griffith to mind.
I thought about Wayne because during the summer of 1994, when the plant encountered the second downsizing Wayne was let go along with a lot of other great Power Plant Men. I will talk about other friends during this year that were let go that year, but none that I felt so sad about as I did when Wayne Griffith.
Wayne probably never had a clue that I had cared about him so much. I never told him as much. I would just smile whenever I saw him as I did with all my other friends. Inside, I was putting my arms around him (well, halfway around him anyway) and giving him a true Power Plant Man Hug. As Bill Gibson would say, ” ‘Cause I Love You Man!”
Today, as far as I know, Wayne is still living in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. I don’t know what he’s up to, but if you are ever in the area and happen to see him. Give him a big (and I mean “Big”) hug from me.
Power Plant Men 
Awww. A great story. Sorry about the job closure. Nice story about Wayne. I do hope he was able to find work too. It always hurts the nicest, hardest-working people…lay-offs and closures. I know. I have been off over 2 years. I have lots of certifications, a degree, and am highly skilled; yet no prospects. We can hope and pray it gets better. I don’t know.
Thanks! Great story. When I read it I could still hear Gibson saying “I love ya man”.
Lay-offs are tough. Nothing good about them. I believe it was easier losing my own job than having to tell a “Wayne Griffith” he was losing his.