Hitting the Power Plant HR Cardboard Ceiling
Favorites Post #61
Originally posted September 5, 2015
I spent 12 weeks in Oklahoma City in 1996 working in an office building while the Power Plant Men came to the rescue and caused a culture shock for some who had never experienced a group of Power Plant Men so closely packed in an office cubicle before. The effect can almost be the same as if you have too many radioactive particles compressed together causing a chain reaction ending in a tremendous explosion. Having survived this experience I became intrigued with the idea of working in an office on a computer instead of carrying a tool bucket up 25 flights of stairs to fix the boiler elevator.
Our team had been in Oklahoma City when we were converting the Electric Company in Oklahoma to a new financial and planning system known as SAP. See the post: “Corporate Executive Kent Norris Meets Power Plant Men“. One other person from out plant was in Oklahoma City for the entire 9 months it took to roll out SAP. That was Linda Dallas, our HR Supervisor at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
SAP Logo
Linda Dallas was on the core SAP team which was a coveted spot for one not so obvious reason. The few people that were on the core team were learning how to implement SAP in a fairly large public electric company. The consulting company Ernst and Young were teaching them how to build SAP screens and configure the application as well as how to run a large project. — Do you see where I’m going?
I went out and bought a book on programming SAP myself just in case I had a chance to play around with it when we were in Oklahoma City. I read the book, but unfortunately the opportunity to mess with SAP never came up (or did it?).
A programming book like this
Mark Romano, the engineer that was coordinating our efforts during the project tried to have me assigned to the testing team for SAP, but the SAP guys said they didn’t need anyone else…. For more about Mark Romano, read this post: “Power Plant Marine Battles with God and Wins“. Consequently, when Mark told me that the testing team positions were just as coveted as the core team and they didn’t want an outsider coming in and showing them up, I understood.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet…. SAP was an up and coming terrific software package that took practically your entire company’s computer activities and put them in one all encompassing application. People experienced in SAP were far and few between, so anyone looking for people with SAP experience were finding the pickin’s rather slim (as in Slim Pickens). Because of this, most of the people involved in the core SAP implementation could basically write their ticket when it came to finding a job with a company trying to implement SAP in 1996-97.
I thanked Mark for putting in a good word for me with the testing team. I also told him that the first time I actually am able to use SAP, I will break it within 10 minutes just so the testing team can see how it’s done. — I had a lot of experience with “Negative testing” as it is called in IT. That is when you do what you can to try to break the application.
I like the word “consequently” today, so I’m going to use it again…. Consequently, when Linda Dallas came back to our plant to show us all how to use SAP after we went live, here is what happened….
We went to the small conference room where I had setup about 15 computers all hooked up to the company’s Intranet. The team from Oklahoma City had actually brought the computers. I had just run all the network cables to the room so they could train people 15 at a time. The trainers wanted to “lock down” the computers so that they only had SAP on them and not other things like “Solitaire” that might distract the Power Plant Trainees.
Here is what happened when I showed up for my class…. Linda Dallas was teaching it along with one other guy from Corporate Headquarters…. I’ll call him “Jack”… for various reasons, but mainly because I can’t remember his name… Jack told us that the computers we were using were stripped down so that it didn’t have games like Minesweeper and Solitaire on them, (as did all the regular Windows NT computers).
The first thing I did when he told us that was to browse over to the electric shop computer through the network and copy the minesweeper and the solitaire games from the computer in the electric shop to my training computer….. See how rotten I used to be (yeah… used to be… Huh? What’s that?)… Then I opened Solitaire and started playing it while they explained how to go into SAP and start doing our jobs.
They showed us the Inventory section. That had all the parts in the company in it. That was the part of the application I had helped implement in our small way.
When they showed us the inventory section, I realized right away how I could break SAP, so I proceeded to open 10 different screens of the SAP client, and began some crazy wildcard searches on each one of them. The application came to a grinding halt. (for any developers reading this… let’s call it… “SQL Injection”).
Linda, who was trying to show us how to go from screen-to-screen suddenly was staring at a screen that was going no where. She tried to explain that they were still having some performance issues with the application….
I just stared at my own computer screen trying to figure out if I had a red ten to put on the black jack…. when a red-faced Jack came around the tables and saw me playing Solitaire. I just smiled up at him and he had a confused look on his face as we waited for the screen on the projector to begin working again.
My screen at the time
I knew of course what had happened and after about 5 minutes of everyone’s screen being locked up, the application finally began working again and the training continued. — I was happy. I had completed my testing that the testing team didn’t think they needed. Of course, I did it to honor Mark Romano’s failed attempt to have me moved to the SAP testing team.
Mark Romano
A couple of years later when I was working with Ray Eberle on a Saturday (as we were working 4 – 10s, and rotated onto a Saturday once every 4 weeks), I showed him how I could lock up SAP for the entire company any time I wanted. Since few people were working on Saturday, I figured I could show him how it was done without causing a raucous. It took about 35 seconds and SAP would be down for as long as I wanted. There was a way to prevent this… but…. If the testers never test it, they would never tell the developers to fix it (I’m sure they have fixed it by now… that was 18 years ago).
Ray Eberle
Anyway, the story about implementing SAP isn’t really what this post is about. It is just the preamble that explains why in the spring of 1997, Linda Dallas left as the Supervisor of HR at our plant. She found another job in Dallas (So, Linda Dallas moved to Dallas — how fitting) with some of the other core SAP team members implementing SAP.
When the job opening for Linda Dallas’s job came out at our plant, I figured that since I met the minimum qualification, I might as well apply for it. Why not. It would mean putting away my tool bucket and working on the computer a lot more, which was something I was interested in since my experience a few months earlier when I was working at Corporate Headquarters.
I knew right away that no one would really take my job application seriously. I had all the computer related skills. I had a degree in Psychology, and a Masters in Religious Education from Loyola with a focus on adult education. That wasn’t really the point. I had never been a clerk.
The natural progression of things meant that the only “real” possible pool of applicants were the women clerks in the front office. Specifically Louise Kalicki. Her desk was closest to Linda Dallas’s office, so, in a sense, she was “next-in-line”.
Even though I knew that the plant manager Bill Green and Jim Arnold the Maintenance Supervisor would never want me on the “staff”, I went ahead and applied for the job anyway. I figured, it was worth the experience to apply and go through the interview process even though I wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Bill Green
I think Louise and I were the only two to apply for the job. Maybe Linda Shiever did as well, as she had the most seniority at the plant. Linda was actually the first person hired at the plant when it was first built. Louise had been filling in for Linda Dallas for the past year while Linda Dallas had been in Oklahoma City working on SAP, so she was really a “shoe-in” for the job.
When I went up to the interview, the first thing I had to do was take a timed typing test to see if I could type 35 words a minute (I could type 70). I had dressed up for the interview so that when I walked into the plant manager’s office, Bill Green and Jim Arnold had a little “Hee Haw” about seeing me without coal dust and fly ash coming out of my nose and ears. I told them that “I can get cleaned up when I needed to” (notice that I used the word “get” and ended my sentence with a preposition… just so they didn’t think I was too stuck up. See the post: “Power Plant Men Learned Themselves Proper English“).
No one was surprised when Louise Kalicki was promoted to HR Supervisor. She was probably the best choice when you think about it. She had a better relationship with Bill Green and Jim Arnold than I did and a good part of the job was working with those two rascals (oh… did I actually call them rascals? Bless their hearts).
This was right around the time that I had made my decision to go back to school to work toward a degree in Computer Science. Working with computers was really my passion.
I have an interesting way of making decisions about what I’m going to do with my life. I let certain events help make the decisions, instead of just jumping right in. I had decided (knowing that it was pretty much a safe bet) that if I didn’t get the job as the HR Supervisor, then I would go down to Oklahoma State University just a few miles from my house and enroll in the Arts and Science College and work on a degree in Computer Science.
I made a lot of decisions that way. I figured that if I was meant to do something, then it would work out that way. If not, then, fine, I would go a different route.
Ok. One more side story about working with Ray Eberle and SAP (See the post: “Tales of Power Plant Prowess by Ray Eberle“)… This happened some time around the year 2000.
SAP had this icon of a drip of water dropping and causing a ripple of waves….
SAP water drops
When the application was thinking, this picture was in the upper right hand corner and it was animated, so that the water rippled out as the water dripped. That way you could tell the difference between the application being stuck and just thinking.
This wasn’t just an animated GIF as we might have today. It was actually a series of bitmap pictures that were all strung together into one file. Once I figured this out, I used Paint to modify the picture. I created three new versions…. The first one had a small ship with sails sailing across the rippling water. The second one had a yellow fish that would leap out of the water over and over.
It was the third picture that was my masterpiece. I reversed the flow, so that instead of the water rippling out, it came in as if it was a whirlpool sucking things down. Then I added a small picture of our HR Supervisor’s face being sucked down into the whirlpool.
HR Supervisor sucked down a whirlpool
Then I created a small application that allowed people to change their water rippling animated picture to any of the four (with the regular picture being the fourth option) that they wanted quickly and easily. I know the women in the front office liked the one with the HR supervisor being sucked down the whirlpool the best. I won’t mention who they were, but by the following two pictures, you may be able to guess….
Linda Shiever
Darlene Mitchell
I would think that Bill Green would have liked the sailing ship the best since he liked to sail…. though… for some reason, I never made it around to install my “SAP add-on” on his computer (or Louise Kalicki’s for that matter, since she was the HR Supervisor). Most of the Power Plant Men probably would like the fish jumping out of the water, since they liked fishing. — I know… I know… I was being rotten… but it was fun.
Ok. End of the Side Story and end of the post.
Hitting the Power Plant HR Cardboard Ceiling
I spent 12 weeks in Oklahoma City in 1996 working in an office building while the Power Plant Men came to the rescue and caused a culture shock for some who had never experienced a group of Power Plant Men so closely packed in an office cubicle before. The effect can almost be the same as if you have too many radioactive particles compressed together causing a chain reaction ending in a tremendous explosion. Having survived this experience I became intrigued with the idea of working in an office on a computer instead of carrying a tool bucket up 25 flights of stairs to fix the boiler elevator.
Our team had been in Oklahoma City when we were converting the Electric Company in Oklahoma to a new financial and planning system known as SAP. See the post: “Corporate Executive Kent Norris Meets Power Plant Men“. One other person from out plant was in Oklahoma City for the entire 9 months it took to roll out SAP. That was Linda Dallas, our HR Supervisor at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
SAP Logo
Linda Dallas was on the core SAP team which was a coveted spot for one not so obvious reason. The few people that were on the core team were learning how to implement SAP in a fairly large public electric company. The consulting company Ernst and Young were teaching them how to build SAP screens and configure the application as well as how to run a large project. — Do you see where I’m going?
I went out and bought a book on programming SAP myself just in case I had a chance to play around with it when we were in Oklahoma City. I read the book, but unfortunately the opportunity to mess with SAP never came up (or did it?).
A programming book like this
Mark Romano, the engineer that was coordinating our efforts during the project tried to have me assigned to the testing team for SAP, but the SAP guys said they didn’t need anyone else…. For more about Mark Romano, read this post: “Power Plant Marine Battles with God and Wins“. Consequently, when Mark told me that the testing team positions were just as coveted as the core team and they didn’t want an outsider coming in and showing them up, I understood.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet…. SAP was an up and coming terrific software package that took practically your entire company’s computer activities and put them in one all encompassing application. People experienced in SAP were far and few between, so anyone looking for people with SAP experience were finding the pickins rather slim (as in Slim Pickens). Because of this, most of the people involved in the core SAP implementation could basically write their ticket when it came to finding a job with a company trying to implement SAP in 1996-97.
I thanked Mark for putting in a good word for me with the testing team. I also told him that the first time I actually am able to use SAP, I will break it within 10 minutes just so the testing team can see how it’s done. — I had a lot of experience with “Negative testing” as it is called in IT. That is when you do what you can to try to break the application.
I like the word “consequently” today, so I’m going to use it again…. Consequently, when Linda Dallas came back to our plant to show us all how to use SAP, here is what happened….
We went to the small conference room where I had setup about 15 computers all hooked up to the company’s Intranet. The team from Oklahoma City had actually brought the computers. I had just run all the network cables to the room so they could train people 15 at a time. The trainers wanted to “lock down” the computers so that they only had SAP on them and not other things like “Solitaire” that might distract the Power Plant Trainees.
Here is what happened when I showed up for my class…. Linda Dallas was teaching it along with one other guy from Corporate Headquarters…. I’ll call him “Jack”… for various reasons, but mainly because I can’t remember his name… Jack told us that the computers we were using were stripped down so that it didn’t have games like Minesweeper and Solitaire on them, (as did all the regular Windows NT computers).
The first thing I did when he told us that was to browse over to the electric shop computer through the network and copy the minesweeper and the solitaire games from the computer in the electric shop to my training computer….. See how rotten I used to be (yeah… used to be… Huh? What’s that?)… Then I opened Solitaire and started playing it while they explained how to go into SAP and start doing our jobs.
They showed us the Inventory section. That had all the parts in the company in it. That was the part of the application I had helped implement in our small way.
When they showed us the inventory section, I realized right away how I could break SAP, so I proceeded to open 10 different screens of the SAP client, and began some crazy wildcard searches on each one of them. The application came to a grinding halt. (for any developers reading this… let’s call it… “SQL Injection”).
Linda, who was trying to show us how to go from screen-to-screen suddenly was staring at a screen that was going no where. She tried to explain that they were still having some performance issues with the application….
I just stared at my own computer screen trying to figure out if I had a red ten to put on the black jack…. when a red-faced Jack came around the tables and saw me playing Solitaire. I just smiled up at him and he had a confused look on his face as we waited for the screen on the projector to begin working again.
My screen at the time
I knew of course what had happened and after about 5 minutes of everyone’s screen being locked up, the application finally began working again and the training continued. — I was happy. I had completed my testing that the testing team didn’t think they needed. Of course, I did it to honor Mark Romano’s failed attempt to have me moved to the SAP testing team.
Mark Romano
A couple of years later when I was working with Ray Eberle on a Saturday (as we were working 4 – 10s, and rotated onto a Saturday once every 4 weeks), I showed him how I could lock up SAP for the entire company any time I wanted. Since few people were working on Saturday, I figured I could show him how it was done without causing a raucous. It took about 35 seconds and SAP would be down for as long as I wanted. There was a way to prevent this… but…. If the testers never test it, they would never tell the developers to fix it (I’m sure they have fixed it by now… that was 18 years ago).
Ray Eberle
Anyway, the story about implementing SAP isn’t really what this post is about. It is just the preamble that explains why in the spring of 1997, Linda Dallas left as the Supervisor of HR at our plant. She found another job in Dallas with some of the other core SAP team members implementing SAP.
When the job opening for Linda Dallas’s job came out at our plant, I figured that since I met the minimum qualification, I might as well apply for it. Why not. It would mean putting away my tool bucket and working on the computer a lot more, which was something I was interested in since my experience a few months earlier when I was working at Corporate Headquarters.
I knew right away that no one would really take my job application seriously. I had all the computer related skills. I had a degree in Psychology, and a Masters in Religious Education from Loyola with a focus on adult education. That wasn’t really the point. I had never been a clerk.
The natural progression of things meant that the only “real” possible pool of applicants were the women clerks in the front office. Specifically Louise Kalicki. Her desk was closest to Linda Dallas’s office, so, in a sense, she was “next-in-line”.
Even though I knew that the plant manager Bill Green and Jim Arnold the Maintenance Supervisor would never want me on the “staff”, I went ahead and applied for the job anyway. I figured, it was worth the experience to apply and go through the interview process even though I wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Bill Green
I think Louise and I were the only two to apply for the job. Maybe Linda Shiever did as well, as she had the most seniority at the plant. Linda was actually the first person hired at the plant when it was first built. Louise had been filling in for Linda Dallas for the past year while Linda Dallas had been in Oklahoma City working on SAP, so she was really a “shoe-in” for the job.
When I went up to the interview, the first thing I had to do was take a timed typing test to see if I could type 35 words a minute (I could type 70). I had dressed up for the interview so that when I walked into the plant manager’s office, Bill Green and Jim Arnold had a little “Hee Haw” about seeing me without coal dust and fly ash coming out of my nose and ears. I told them that “I can get cleaned up when I needed to” (notice that I used the word “get” and ended my sentence with a preposition… just so they didn’t think I was too stuck up. See the post: “Power Plant Men Learned Themselves Proper English“).
No one was surprised when Louise Kalicki was promoted to HR Supervisor. She was probably the best choice when you think about it. She had a better relationship with Bill Green and Jim Arnold than I did and a good part of the job was working with those two rascals (oh… did I actually call them rascals? Bless their hearts).
This was right around the time that I had made my decision to go back to school to work toward a degree in Computer Science. Working with computers was really my passion.
I have an interesting way of making decisions about what I’m going to do with my life. I let certain events help make the decisions, instead of just jumping right in. I had decided (knowing that it was pretty much a safe bet) that if I didn’t get the job as the HR Supervisor, then I would go down to Oklahoma State University just a few miles from my house and enroll in the Arts and Science College and work on a degree in Computer Science.
I made a lot of decisions that way. I figured that if I was meant to do something, then it would work out that way. If not, then, fine, I would go a different route.
Ok. One more side story about working with Ray Eberle and SAP (See the post: “Tales of Power Plant Prowess by Ray Eberle“)… This happened some time around the year 2000.
SAP had this icon of a drip of water dropping and causing a ripple of waves….
SAP water drops
When the application was thinking, this picture was in the upper right hand corner and it was animated, so that the water rippled out as the water dripped. That way you could tell the difference between the application being stuck and just thinking.
This wasn’t just an animated GIF as we might have today. It was actually a series of bitmap pictures that were all strung together into one file. Once I figured this out, I used Paint to modify the picture. I created three new versions…. The first one had a small ship with sails sailing across the rippling water. The second one had a yellow fish that would leap out of the water over and over.
It was the third picture that was my masterpiece. I reversed the flow, so that instead of the water rippling out, it came in as if it was a whirlpool sucking things down. Then I added a small picture of our HR Supervisor’s face being sucked down into the whirlpool.
HR Supervisor sucked down a whirlpool
Then I created a small application that allowed people to change their water rippling animated picture to any of the four (with the regular picture being the fourth option) that they wanted quickly and easily. I know the women in the front office liked the one with the HR supervisor being sucked down the whirlpool the best. I won’t mention who they were, but by the following two pictures, you may be able to guess….
Linda Shiever
Darlene Mitchell
I would think that Bill Green would have liked the sailing ship the best since he liked to sail…. though… for some reason, I never made it around to install my “SAP add-on” on his computer (or Louise Kalicki’s for that matter, since she was the HR Supervisor). Most of the Power Plant Men probably would like the fish jumping out of the water, since they liked fishing. — I know… I know… I was being rotten… but it was fun.
Ok. End of the Side Story and end of the post.
The Heart of a Power Plant
I was considered the one that “got away”. Power Plant Men don’t normally leave the Power Plant to go work somewhere else unless they are retiring, being laid off, or for some other compelling reason. I freely walked away of my own accord August 16, 2001. I left a job where I could have worked until the day I retired to step out into the unknown. But… that was the way I had arrived on May 7, 1979, 22 years earlier.
Just as I had driven onto the plant grounds those many years ago, unsure what I was going to encounter, I was now leaving the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma to change my career and become an IT programmer for Dell Computers in Round Rock Texas. When I arrived my first day at the plant, I had no idea what I was stepping into… The day I left I was in the exact same boat.
The Power Plant
So far, I have gone through my life accepting whatever happens as something that happens for a reason. With that in mind, I have the belief that whatever the future holds, I just need to hang in there and everything will work out for the best, even though it may not seem like it at the time. Let me tell you about this experience….
I had accepted the job offer from Dell early in January. My start date had been set for June 4, 2001. They were giving me $3,000 for moving expenses to move down to Round Rock when I finished college in May. I was being hired as an undergraduate college hire. I would be starting at a slightly smaller salary than my base salary as an electrician.
I was taking a considerable cut in salary when you consider the overtime that a Power Plant electrician racked up in a year. I figured I was starting at the bottom of the ladder in my new job, where I was pretty well topped out at the plant with no opportunity to advance in sight. Maybe in a few years my salary would catch up and surpass what I made as an electrician.
For about 10 weeks, we drove down to the Austin area and look for a house on the weekends. It became apparent soon after our house hunting began that the cost of houses was somewhat higher than they were in Stillwater Oklahoma. We finally had a contract on a house in Round Rock, just 10 minutes away from the main Dell campus.
While we were looking for a house in the Round Rock area, we kept hearing on the radio that Dell was laying off thousands of employees. The Internet bubble had burst and the drop in sales of computers was taking a toll on the company. Every time I called the recruiter, I would find that they had been laid off and I had been assigned a different recruiter. This was disheartening to say the least.
Here I was in a perfectly secure job as an electrician at the Power Plant and I was leaving it to go work for a company that was in the middle of laying off employees. My wife Kelly and I had been saying one Novena after the other that we make the correct decision about what we should do, and we had chosen Dell Computer. It just seemed like the right place to go. So, we decided to just go along with it.
We prayed the Infant Of Prague Novena every day that we made the right choice.
The Infant of Prague is a wax statue of Jesus as a Boy in a Church in Prague, Czech Republic
I gave the plant a 3 month notice that I would be leaving in June. We had timed the purchase of the house in Round Rock for Friday, June 1. I would start work the following Monday. Dell was going to send me my moving expenses on May 4th, one month before my job would begin.
On the morning of Thursday, May 3rd, our realtor in Stillwater called and said she had a contract to sell our home in Stillwater and was going to head out to our house for us to sign. I had stayed home from work that morning for that reason. We were expecting her to arrive at 9:00 am.
At 8:30 I received a call from Dell computers that went something like this….. “Kevin, I am calling to inform you that your offer for employment has changed. Your first day will no longer be June 4, but will be August 20 (2-1/2 months later). The good news is that you still have a job with Dell, it just doesn’t start until August.”
Since I was expecting the moving expenses the following day on May 4, I asked the recruiter about that. He said that since my start date was moved to August, I wouldn’t receive the moving expenses until July. I told him that I was in the middle of buying a house in Round Rock and that I was counting on that money. He said he would see what he could do about that.
I hung up the phone and looked at Kelly who was standing there watching my face go from a normal tan to a red glow, then an ashen color all in the matter of 20 seconds. I explained to her that Dell said I still had a job, but it wouldn’t start until August.
The Realtor was going to be arriving in about 20 minutes for us to sign to sell our house. Everything was in motion. It took Kelly and I about 5 minutes to discuss our options before we decided that since we had been praying to make the right choice, we were going to go with this new development.
I called Louise Kalicki, our HR supervisor at the plant and told her that Dell had moved my start date from June 4 to August 20, and I wondered if I could stay on the extra two and a half months. I was surprised that she had an answer for me so quickly, but here is what she said, “We can keep you on until August 17, but after that date, we will no longer have a job for you.” I thanked her, and hung up the phone.
Our realtor arrived with the contract for us to sign to sell our house with five acres. When she walked in the kitchen, I told her what had just happened 1/2 hour earlier. I could see the sick look on her face after she had worked so hard for so many months to find a buyer for our house. Here I was telling her that Dell was postponing my hire date.
When I came to the part about where we decided to go ahead with our plans and sell the house and move to Round Rock, I could see all the tension that had been building up behind her ever increasing bulging eyes suddenly ease off. We signed the papers and our house was set to be sold on June 29. I had to swing a loan for the month where I bought the house in Round Rock and I sold my house in Stillwater (and hoped that the house was actually sold on time).
A few hours later I received a call from the Dell recruiter saying that he had pulled a few strings and I was going to receive my moving expenses the following day. The following week after that, the recruiter that had helped me had been laid off as well.
When my final day had arrived on August 16 (I was working 4 -10s, and my last work day that week was Thursday), I was given a going away party (see the post “Power Plant Final Presentation“). The party was over around 1:30 and I was free to leave.
I said my goodbye’s to my friends in the office area and went down to the electric shop to gather up the rest of my things and leave. Scott Hubbard asked me if he could trade his Multimeter with me since I had a fancy True RMS Multimeter and he was still using an older version. So, I traded him, and picked up my tool bucket and headed for the parking lot.
Scott Hubbard
As I approached my car, I could see that Diana Brien was out there waiting for me to leave. She gave me a Chocolate Chip Cookie the size of a pizza and said she wanted to say goodbye to me and tell me that she had enjoyed being my bucket buddy all those years. I told her I was going to miss her and everyone else in the shop.
My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien
With that I climbed in my car and drove away.
When I was selling my house outside Stillwater, I thought that the thing I was going to miss the most was the wide open spaces where we lived. Our house was on a hill in the country overlooking the city of Stillwater. We had an Atrium in the living room where you could sit and look at the city lights at night and watch thunderstorms as they blasted transformers around the town.
I was moving into a neighborhood where the house next to ours was no more than 15 feet away. I thought I’m really going to miss this house…. I thought that until the moment I drove out of the parking lot at the Power Plant.
Then it suddenly hit me…. What about my family? What about all those people I have just left behind? When am I ever going to see them? The thought of missing my house never entered my mind from that moment on. It was replaced by the great pain one feels when they pack up and walk away from their family not knowing if you will ever see them again.
My heart was still back there with the Power Plant Men and Women I left behind.
The seven hour drive from the plant to Round Rock Texas was a blur. I knew that I had just closed one door and stepped into an entirely new world. I didn’t even know if I would like being a programmer when it came down to it. I had always just been a hacker and I knew I had a lot of holes in my knowledge. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be any good at my job.
To make that long story short, I have never regretted my move to Round Rock Texas. I have just gone with the flow knowing that whatever happens, it happens for a reason. After 12 1/2 years working at Dell, I changed jobs again to work for General Motors in their IT department where I am currently working with the Onstar team (and now working on Kronos).
My friends at Dell asked me the past few years… “Are you going to write about us like you do with the Power Plant Men?” My reply to that question was “I don’t know… Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
That was the same thing I told Sonny Karcher the first day I arrived at the Power Plant and he asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated college. I told him. “I don’t know. I was thinking about becoming a writer.” His next question was, “Are you going to write about us?” I replied, “Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
Hitting the Power Plant HR Cardboard Ceiling
I spent 12 weeks in Oklahoma City in 1996 working in an office building while the Power Plant Men came to the rescue and caused a culture shock for some who had never experienced a group of Power Plant Men so closely packed in an office cubicle before. The effect can almost be the same as if you have too many radioactive particles compressed together causing a chain reaction ending in a tremendous explosion. Having survived this experience I became intrigued with the idea of working in an office on a computer instead of carrying a tool bucket up 25 flights of stairs to fix the boiler elevator.
Our team had been in Oklahoma City when we were converting the Electric Company in Oklahoma to a new financial and planning system known as SAP. See the post: “Corporate Executive Kent Norris Meets Power Plant Men“. One other person from out plant was in Oklahoma City for the entire 9 months it took to roll out SAP. That was Linda Dallas, our HR Supervisor at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
SAP Logo
Linda Dallas was on the core SAP team which was a coveted spot for one not so obvious reason. The few people that were on the core team were learning how to implement SAP in a fairly large public electric company. The consulting company Ernst and Young were teaching them how to build SAP screens and configure the application as well as how to run a large project. — Do you see where I’m going?
I went out and bought a book on programming SAP myself just in case I had a chance to play around with it when we were in Oklahoma City. I read the book, but unfortunately the opportunity to mess with SAP never came up.
A programming book like this
Mark Romano, the engineer that was coordinating our efforts during the project tried to have me assigned to the testing team for SAP, but the SAP guys said they didn’t need anyone else…. For more about Mark Romano, read this post: “Power Plant Marine Battles with God and Wins“. Consequently, when Mark told me that the testing team positions were just as coveted as the core team and they didn’t want an outsider coming in and showing them up, I understood.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet…. SAP was an up and coming terrific software package that took practically your entire company’s computer activities and put them in one all encompassing application. People experienced in SAP were far and few between, so anyone looking for people with SAP experience were finding the pickin’s rather slim. Because of this, most of the people involved in the core SAP implementation could basically write their ticket when it came to finding a job with a company trying to implement SAP in 1996-97.
I thanked Mark for putting in a good word for me with the testing team. I also told him that the first time I actually am able to use SAP, I will break it within 10 minutes just so the testing team can see how it’s done. — I had a lot of experience with “Negative testing” as it is called in IT. That is when you do what you can to try to break the application.
I like the word “consequently” today, so I’m going to use it again…. Consequently, when Linda Dallas came back to our plant to show us all how to use SAP, here is what happened….
We went to the small conference room where I had setup about 15 computers all hooked up to the company’s Intranet. The team from Oklahoma City had actually brought the computers. I had just run all the network cables to the room so they could train people 15 at a time. The trainers wanted to “lock down” the computers so that they only had SAP on them and not other things like “Solitaire” that might distract the Power Plant Trainees.
Here is what happened when I showed up for my class…. Linda Dallas was teaching it along with one other guy from Corporate Headquarters…. I’ll call him “Jack”… for various reasons, but mainly because I can’t remember his name… Jack told us that the computers we were using were stripped down so that it didn’t have games like Minesweeper and Solitaire on them, (as did all the regular Windows NT computers).
The first thing I did when he told us that was to browse over to the electric shop computer through the network and copy the minesweeper and the solitaire games from the computer in the electric shop to my training computer….. See how rotten I used to be (yeah… used to be… Huh? What’s that?)… Then I opened Solitaire and started playing it while they explained how to go into SAP and start doing our jobs.
They showed us the Inventory section. That had all the parts in the company in it. That was the part of the application I had helped implement in our small way.
When they showed us the inventory section, I realized right away how I could break SAP, so I proceeded to open 10 different screens of the SAP client, and began some crazy wildcard searches on each one of them. The application came to a grinding halt. (for any developers reading this… let’s call it… “SQL Injection”).
Linda, who was trying to show us how to go from screen-to-screen suddenly was staring at a screen that was going no where. She tried to explain that they were still having some performance issues with the application….
I just stared at my own computer screen trying to figure out if I had a red ten to put on the black jack…. when a red-faced Jack came around the tables and saw me playing Solitaire. I just smiled up at him and he had a confused look on his face as we waited for the screen on the projector to begin working again.
My screen at the time
I knew of course what had happened and after about 5 minutes of everyone’s screen being locked up, the application finally began working again and the training continued. — I was happy. I had completed my testing that the testing team didn’t think they needed. Of course, I did it to honor Mark Romano’s failed attempt to have me moved to the SAP testing team.
Mark Romano
A couple of years later when I was working with Ray Eberle on a Saturday (as we were working 4 – 10s, and rotated onto a Saturday once every 4 weeks), I showed him how I could lock up SAP for the entire company any time I wanted. Since few people were working on Saturday, I figured I could show him how it was done without causing a raucous. It took about 35 seconds and SAP would be down for as long as I wanted. There was a way to prevent this… but…. If the testers never test it, they would never tell the developers to fix it (I’m sure they have fixed it by now… that was 18 years ago).
Ray Eberle
Anyway, the story about implementing SAP isn’t really what this post is about. It is just the preamble that explains why in the spring of 1997, Linda Dallas left as the Supervisor of HR at our plant. She found another job in Dallas with some of the other core SAP team members implementing SAP.
When the job opening for Linda Dallas’s job came out at our plant, I figured that since I met the minimum qualification, I might as well apply for it. Why not. It would mean putting away my tool bucket and working on the computer a lot more, which was something I was interested in since my experience a few months earlier when I was working at Corporate Headquarters.
I knew right away that no one would really take my job application seriously. I had all the computer related skills. I had a degree in Psychology, and a Masters in Religious Education from Loyola with a focus on adult education. That wasn’t really the point. I had never been a clerk.
The natural progression of things meant that the only “real” possible pool of applicants were the women clerks in the front office. Specifically Louise Kalicki. Her desk was closest to Linda Dallas’s office, so, in a sense, she was “next-in-line”.
Even though I knew that the plant manager Bill Green and Jim Arnold the Maintenance Supervisor would never want me on the “staff”, I went ahead and applied for the job anyway. I figured, it was worth the experience to apply and go through the interview process even though I wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Bill Green
I think Louise and I were the only two to apply for the job. Maybe Linda Shiever did as well, as she had the most seniority at the plant. Linda was actually the first person hired at the plant when it was first built. Louise had been filling in for Linda Dallas for the past year while Linda Dallas had been in Oklahoma City working on SAP, so she was really a “shoe-in” for the job.
When I went up to the interview, the first thing I had to do was take a timed typing test to see if I could type 35 words a minute (I could type 70). I had dressed up for the interview so that when I walked into the plant manager’s office, Bill Green and Jim Arnold had a little “Hee Haw” about seeing me without coal dust and fly ash coming out of my nose and ears. I told them that “I can get cleaned up when I needed to” (notice that I used the word “get” and ended my sentence with a preposition… just so they didn’t think I was too stuck up. See the post: “Power Plant Men Learned Themselves Proper English“).
No one was surprised when Louise Kalicki was promoted to HR Supervisor. She was probably the best choice when you think about it. She had a better relationship with Bill Green and Jim Arnold than I did and a good part of the job was working with those two rascals (oh… did I actually call them rascals? Bless their hearts).
This was right around the time that I had made my decision to go back to school to work toward a degree in Computer Science. Working with computers was really my passion.
I have an interesting way of making decisions about what I’m going to do with my life. I let certain events help make the decisions, instead of just jumping right in. I had decided (knowing that it was pretty much a safe bet) that if I didn’t get the job as the HR Supervisor, then I would go down to Oklahoma State University just a few miles from my house and enroll in the Arts and Science College and work on a degree in Computer Science.
I made a lot of decisions that way. I figured that if I was meant to do something, then it would work out that way. If not, then, fine, I would go a different route.
Ok. One more side story about working with Ray Eberle and SAP (See the post: “Tales of Power Plant Prowess by Ray Eberle“)… This happened some time around the year 2000.
SAP had this icon of a drip of water dropping and causing a ripple of waves….
SAP water drops
When the application was thinking, this picture was in the upper right hand corner and it was animated, so that the water rippled out as the water dripped. That way you could tell the difference between the application being stuck and just thinking.
This wasn’t just an animated GIF as we might have today. It was actually a series of bitmap pictures that were all strung together into one file. Once I figured this out, I used Paint to modify the picture. I created three new versions…. The first one had a small ship with sails sailing across the rippling water. The second one had a yellow fish that would leap out of the water over and over.
It was the third picture that was my masterpiece. I reversed the flow, so that instead of the water rippling out, it came in as if it was a whirlpool sucking things down. Then I added a small picture of our HR Supervisor’s face being sucked down into the whirlpool.
HR Supervisor sucked down a whirlpool
Then I created a small application that allowed people to change their water rippling animated picture to any of the four (with the regular picture being the fourth option) that they wanted quickly and easily. I know the women in the front office liked the one with the HR supervisor being sucked down the whirlpool the best. I won’t mention who they were, but by the following two pictures, you may be able to guess….
Linda Shiever
Darlene Mitchell
I would think that Bill Green would have liked the sailing ship the best since he liked to sail…. though… for some reason, I never made it around to install my “SAP add-on” on his computer (or Louise Kalicki’s for that matter, since she was the HR Supervisor). Most of the Power Plant Men probably would like the fish jumping out of the water, since they liked fishing. — I know… I know… I was being rotten… but it was fun.
Ok. End of the Side Story and end of the post.
The Heart of a Power Plant
I was considered the one that “got away”. Power Plant Men don’t normally leave the Power Plant to go work somewhere else unless they are retiring, being laid off, or for some other compelling reason. I freely walked away of my own accord August 16, 2001. I left a job where I could have worked until the day I retired to step out into the unknown. But… that was the way I had arrived on May 7, 1979, 22 years earlier.
Just as I had driven onto the plant grounds those many years ago, unsure what I was going to encounter, I was now leaving the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma to change my career and become an IT programmer for Dell Computers in Round Rock Texas. When I arrived my first day at the plant, I had no idea what I was stepping into… The day I left I was in the exact same boat.
The Intake is just to the right of this picture across the canal
So far, I have gone through my life accepting whatever happens as something that happens for a reason. With that in mind, I have the belief that whatever the future holds, I just need to hang in there and everything will work out for the best, even though it may not seem like it at the time. Let me tell you about this experience….
I had accepted the job offer from Dell early in January. My start date had been set for June 4, 2001. They were giving me $3,000 for moving expenses to move down to Round Rock when I finished college in May. I was being hired as an undergraduate college hire. I would be starting at a slightly smaller salary than my base salary as an electrician.
I was taking a considerable cut in salary when you consider the overtime that an Power Plant electrician racked up in a year. I figured I was starting at the bottom of the ladder in my new job, where I was pretty well topped out at the plant with no opportunity to advance in sight. Maybe in a few years my salary would catch up and surpass what I made as an electrician.
For about 10 weeks, we drove down to the Austin area and look for a house on the weekends. It became apparent soon after our house hunting began that the cost of houses was somewhat higher than they were in Stillwater Oklahoma. We finally had a contract on a house in Round Rock, just 10 minutes away from the main Dell campus.
While we were looking for a house in the Round Rock area, we kept hearing on the radio that Dell was laying off thousands of employees. The Internet bubble had burst and the drop in sales of computers was taking a toll on the company. Every time I called the recruiter, I would find that they had been laid off and I had been assigned a different recruiter. This was disheartening to say the least.
Here I was in a perfectly secure job as an electrician at the Power Plant and I was leaving it to go work for a company that was in the middle of laying off employees. My wife Kelly and I had been saying one Novena after the other that we make the correct decision about what we should do, and we had chosen Dell Computer. It just seemed like the right place to go. So, we decided to just go along with it.
We prayed the Infant Of Prague Novena every day that we made the right choice.
The Infant of Prague is a wax statue of Jesus as a Boy in a Church in Prague, Czech Republic
I gave the plant a 3 month notice that I would be leaving in June. We had timed the purchase of the house in Round Rock for Friday, June 1. I would start work the following Monday. Dell was going to send me my moving expenses on May 4th, one month before my job would begin.
On the morning of Thursday, May 3rd, our realtor in Stillwater called and said she had a contract to sell our home in Stillwater and was going to head out to our house for us to sign. I had stayed home that morning for that reason. We were expecting her to arrive at 9:00 am.
At 8:30 I received a call from Dell computers that went something like this….. “Kevin, I am calling to inform you that your offer for employment has changed. Your first day will no longer be June 4, but will be August 20 (2-1/2 months later). The good news is that you still have a job with Dell, it just doesn’t start until August.”
Since I was expecting the moving expenses the following day on May 4, I asked the recruiter about that. He said that since my start date was moved to August, I wouldn’t receive the moving expenses until July. I told him that I was in the middle of buying a house in Round Rock and that I was counting on that money. He said he would see what he could do about that.
I hung up the phone and looked at Kelly who was standing there watching my face go from a normal tan to a red glow, then an ashen color all in the matter of 20 seconds. I explained to her that Dell said I still had a job, but it wouldn’t start until August.
The Realtor was going to be arriving in about 20 minutes for us to sign to sell our house. Everything was in motion. It took Kelly and I about 5 minutes to discuss our options before we decided that since we had been praying to make the right choice, we were going to go with this new development.
I called Louise Kalicki, our HR supervisor at the plant and told her that Dell had moved my start date from June 4 to August 20, and I wondered if I could stay on the extra two and a half months. I was surprised that she had an answer for me so quickly, but here is what she said, “We can keep you on until August 17, but after that date, we will no longer have a job for you.” I thanked her, and hung up the phone.
Our realtor arrived with the contract for us to sign to sell our house with five acres. When she walked in the kitchen, I told her what had just happened 1/2 hour earlier. I could see the sick look on her face after she had worked so hard for so many months to find a buyer for our house. Here I was telling her that Dell was postponing my hire date.
When I came to the part about where we decided to go ahead with our plans and sell the house and move to Round Rock, I could see all the tension that had been building up behind her ever increasing bulging eyes suddenly ease off. We signed the papers and our house was set to be sold on June 29. I had to swing a loan for the month where I bought the house in Round Rock and I sold my house in Stillwater (and hoped that the house was actually sold on time).
A few hours later I received a call from the Dell recruiter saying that he had pulled a few strings and I was going to receive my moving expenses the following day. The following week after that, the recruiter that had helped me had been laid off as well.
When my final day had arrived on August 16 (I was working 4 -10s, and my last work day that week was Thursday), I was given a going away party (see the post “Power Plant Final Presentation“). The party was over around 1:30 and I was free to leave.
I said my goodbye’s to my friends in the office area and went down to the electric shop to gather up the rest of my things and leave. Scott Hubbard asked me if he could trade his Multimeter with me since I had a fancy True RMS Multimeter and he was still using an older version. So, I traded him, and picked up my tool bucket and headed for the parking lot.
Scott Hubbard
As I approached my car, I could see that Diana Brien was out there waiting for me to leave. She gave me a Chocolate Chip Cookie the size of a pizza and said she wanted to say goodbye to me and tell me that she had enjoyed being my bucket buddy all those years. I told her I was going to miss her and everyone else in the shop.
My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien
With that I climbed in my car and drove away.
When I was selling my house outside Stillwater, I thought that the thing I was going to miss the most was the wide open spaces where we lived. Our house was on a hill in the country overlooking the city of Stillwater. We had an Atrium in the living room where you could sit and look at the city lights at night and watch thunderstorms as they blasted transformers around the town.
I was moving into a neighborhood where the house next to ours was no more than 15 feet away. I thought I’m really going to miss this house…. I thought that until the moment I drove out of the parking lot at the Power Plant.
Then it suddenly hit me…. What about my family? What about all those people I have just left behind? When am I ever going to see them? The thought of missing my house never entered my mind from that moment on. It was replaced by the great pain one feels when they pack up and walk away from their family not knowing if you will ever see them again.
My heart was still back there with the Power Plant Men and Women I left behind.
The seven hour drive from the plant to Round Rock Texas was a blur. I knew that I had just closed one door and stepped into an entirely new world. I didn’t even know if I would like being a programmer when it came down to it. I had always just been a hacker and I knew I had a lot of holes in my knowledge. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be any good at my job.
To make that long story short, I have never regretted my move to Round Rock Texas. I have just gone with the flow knowing that whatever happens, it happens for a reason. After 12 1/2 years working at Dell, I changed jobs again to work for General Motors in their IT department where I am currently working with the Onstar team.
My friends at Dell asked me the past few years… “Are you going to write about us like you do with the Power Plant Men?” My reply to that question was “I don’t know… Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
That was the same thing I told Sonny Karcher the first day I arrived at the Power Plant and he asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated college. I told him. “I don’t know. I was thinking about becoming a writer.” His next question was, “Are you going to write about us?” I replied, “Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
The Heart of a Power Plant
I was considered the one that “got away”. Power Plant Men don’t normally leave the Power Plant to go work somewhere else unless they are retiring, being laid off, or for some other compelling reason. I freely walked away of my own accord August 16, 2001. I left a job where I could have worked until the day I retired to step out into the unknown. But… that was the way I had arrived on May 7, 1979, 22 years earlier.
Just as I had driven onto the plant grounds those many years ago, unsure what I was going to encounter, I was now leaving the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma to change my career and become an IT programmer for Dell Computers in Round Rock Texas. When I arrived my first day at the plant, I had no idea what I was stepping into… The day I left I was in the exact same boat.
The Intake is just to the right of this picture across the canal
So far, I have gone through my life accepting whatever happens as something that happens for a reason. With that in mind, I have the belief that whatever the future holds, I just need to hang in there and everything will work out for the best, even though it may not seem like it at the time. Let me tell you about this experience….
I had accepted the job offer from Dell early in January. My start date had been set for June 4, 2001. They were giving me $3,000 for moving expenses to move down to Round Rock when I finished college in May. I was being hired as an undergraduate college hire. I would be starting at a slightly smaller salary than my base salary as an electrician.
I was taking a considerable cut in salary when you consider the overtime that a Power Plant electrician racked up in a year. I figured I was starting at the bottom of the ladder in my new job, where I was pretty well topped out at the plant with no opportunity to advance in sight. Maybe in a few years my salary would catch up and surpass what I made as an electrician.
For about 10 weeks, we drove down to the Austin area and look for a house on the weekends. It became apparent soon after our house hunting began that the cost of houses was somewhat higher than they were in Stillwater Oklahoma. We finally had a contract on a house in Round Rock, just 10 minutes away from the main Dell campus.
While we were looking for a house in the Round Rock area, we kept hearing on the radio that Dell was laying off thousands of employees. The Internet bubble had burst and the drop in sales of computers was taking a toll on the company. Every time I called the recruiter, I would find that they had been laid off and I had been assigned a different recruiter. This was disheartening to say the least.
Here I was in a perfectly secure job as an electrician at the Power Plant and I was leaving it to go work for a company that was in the middle of laying off employees. My wife Kelly and I had been saying one Novena after the other that we make the correct decision about what we should do, and we had chosen Dell Computer. It just seemed like the right place to go. So, we decided to just go along with it.
We prayed the Infant Of Prague Novena every day that we made the right choice.
The Infant of Prague is a wax statue of Jesus as a Boy in a Church in Prague, Czech Republic
I gave the plant a 3 month notice that I would be leaving in June. We had timed the purchase of the house in Round Rock for Friday, June 1. I would start work the following Monday. Dell was going to send me my moving expenses on May 4th, one month before my job would begin.
On the morning of Thursday, May 3rd, our realtor in Stillwater called and said she had a contract to sell our home in Stillwater and was going to head out to our house for us to sign. I had stayed home that morning for that reason. We were expecting her to arrive at 9:00 am.
At 8:30 I received a call from Dell computers that went something like this….. “Kevin, I am calling to inform you that your offer for employment has changed. Your first day will no longer be June 4, but will be August 20 (2-1/2 months later). The good news is that you still have a job with Dell, it just doesn’t start until August.”
Since I was expecting the moving expenses the following day on May 4, I asked the recruiter about that. He said that since my start date was moved to August, I wouldn’t receive the moving expenses until July. I told him that I was in the middle of buying a house in Round Rock and that I was counting on that money. He said he would see what he could do about that.
I hung up the phone and looked at Kelly who was standing there watching my face go from a normal tan to a red glow, then an ashen color all in the matter of 20 seconds. I explained to her that Dell said I still had a job, but it wouldn’t start until August.
The Realtor was going to be arriving in about 20 minutes for us to sign to sell our house. Everything was in motion. It took Kelly and I about 5 minutes to discuss our options before we decided that since we had been praying to make the right choice, we were going to go with this new development.
I called Louise Kalicki, our HR supervisor at the plant and told her that Dell had moved my start date from June 4 to August 20, and I wondered if I could stay on the extra two and a half months. I was surprised that she had an answer for me so quickly, but here is what she said, “We can keep you on until August 17, but after that date, we will no longer have a job for you.” I thanked her, and hung up the phone.
Our realtor arrived with the contract for us to sign to sell our house with five acres. When she walked in the kitchen, I told her what had just happened 1/2 hour earlier. I could see the sick look on her face after she had worked so hard for so many months to find a buyer for our house. Here I was telling her that Dell was postponing my hire date.
When I came to the part about where we decided to go ahead with our plans and sell the house and move to Round Rock, I could see all the tension that had been building up behind her ever increasing bulging eyes suddenly ease off. We signed the papers and our house was set to be sold on June 29. I had to swing a loan for the month where I bought the house in Round Rock and I sold my house in Stillwater (and hoped that the house was actually sold on time).
A few hours later I received a call from the Dell recruiter saying that he had pulled a few strings and I was going to receive my moving expenses the following day. The following week after that, the recruiter that had helped me had been laid off as well.
When my final day had arrived on August 16 (I was working 4 -10s, and my last work day that week was Thursday), I was given a going away party (see the post “Power Plant Final Presentation“). The party was over around 1:30 and I was free to leave.
I said my goodbye’s to my friends in the office area and went down to the electric shop to gather up the rest of my things and leave. Scott Hubbard asked me if he could trade his Multimeter with me since I had a fancy True RMS Multimeter and he was still using an older version. So, I traded him, and picked up my tool bucket and headed for the parking lot.
Scott Hubbard
As I approached my car, I could see that Diana Brien was out there waiting for me to leave. She gave me a Chocolate Chip Cookie the size of a pizza and said she wanted to say goodbye to me and tell me that she had enjoyed being my bucket buddy all those years. I told her I was going to miss her and everyone else in the shop.
My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien
With that I climbed in my car and drove away.
When I was selling my house outside Stillwater, I thought that the thing I was going to miss the most was the wide open spaces where we lived. Our house was on a hill in the country overlooking the city of Stillwater. We had an Atrium in the living room where you could sit and look at the city lights at night and watch thunderstorms as they blasted transformers around the town.
I was moving into a neighborhood where the house next to ours was no more than 15 feet away. I thought I’m really going to miss this house…. I thought that until the moment I drove out of the parking lot at the Power Plant.
Then it suddenly hit me…. What about my family? What about all those people I have just left behind? When am I ever going to see them? The thought of missing my house never entered my mind from that moment on. It was replaced by the great pain one feels when they pack up and walk away from their family not knowing if you will ever see them again.
My heart was still back there with the Power Plant Men and Women I left behind.
The seven hour drive from the plant to Round Rock Texas was a blur. I knew that I had just closed one door and stepped into an entirely new world. I didn’t even know if I would like being a programmer when it came down to it. I had always just been a hacker and I knew I had a lot of holes in my knowledge. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be any good at my job.
To make that long story short, I have never regretted my move to Round Rock Texas. I have just gone with the flow knowing that whatever happens, it happens for a reason. After 12 1/2 years working at Dell, I changed jobs again to work for General Motors in their IT department where I am currently working with the Onstar team.
My friends at Dell asked me the past few years… “Are you going to write about us like you do with the Power Plant Men?” My reply to that question was “I don’t know… Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
That was the same thing I told Sonny Karcher the first day I arrived at the Power Plant and he asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated college. I told him. “I don’t know. I was thinking about becoming a writer.” His next question was, “Are you going to write about us?” I replied, “Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
Hitting the Power Plant HR Cardboard Ceiling
I spent 12 weeks in Oklahoma City in 1996 working in an office building while the Power Plant Men came to the rescue and caused a culture shock for some who had never experienced a group of Power Plant Men so closely packed in an office cubicle before. The effect can almost be the same as if you have too many radioactive particles compressed together causing a chain reaction ending in a tremendous explosion. Having survived this experience I became intrigued with the idea of working in an office on a computer instead of carrying a tool bucket up 25 flights of stairs to fix the boiler elevator.
Our team had been in Oklahoma City when we were converting the Electric Company in Oklahoma to a new financial and planning system known as SAP. See the post: “Corporate Executive Kent Norris Meets Power Plant Men“. One other person from out plant was in Oklahoma City for the entire 9 months it took to roll out SAP. That was Linda Dallas, our HR Supervisor at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
SAP Logo
Linda Dallas was on the core SAP team which was a coveted spot for one not so obvious reason. The few people that were on the core team were learning how to implement SAP in a fairly large public electric company. The consulting company Ernst and Young were teaching them how to build SAP screens and configure the application as well as how to run a large project. — Do you see where I’m going?
I went out and bought a book on programming SAP myself just in case I had a chance to play around with it when we were in Oklahoma City. I read the book, but unfortunately the opportunity to mess with SAP never came up.
A programming book like this
Mark Romano, the engineer that was coordinating our efforts during the project tried to have me assigned to the testing team for SAP, but the SAP guys said they didn’t need anyone else…. For more about Mark Romano, read this post: “Power Plant Marine Battles with God and Wins“. Consequently, when Mark told me that the testing team positions were just as coveted as the core team and they didn’t want an outsider coming in and showing them up, I understood.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet…. SAP was an up and coming terrific software package that took practically your entire company’s computer activities and put them in one all encompassing application. People experienced in SAP were far and few between, so anyone looking for people with SAP experience were finding the pickin’s rather slim. Because of this, most of the people involved in the core SAP implementation could basically write their ticket when it came to finding a job with a company trying to implement SAP in 1996-97.
I thanked Mark for putting in a good word for me with the testing team. I also told him that the first time I actually am able to use SAP, I will break it within 10 minutes just so the testing team can see how it’s done. — I had a lot of experience with “Negative testing” as it is called in IT. That is when you do what you can to try to break the application.
I like the word “consequently” today, so I’m going to use it again…. Consequently, when Linda Dallas came back to our plant to show us all how to use SAP, here is what happened….
We went to the small conference room where I had setup about 15 computers all hooked up to the company’s Intranet. The team from Oklahoma City had actually brought the computers. I had just run all the network cables to the room so they could train people 15 at a time. The trainers wanted to “lock down” the computers so that they only had SAP on them and not other things like “Solitaire” that might distract the Power Plant Trainees.
Here is what happened when I showed up for my class…. Linda Dallas was teaching it along with one other guy from Corporate Headquarters…. I’ll call him “Jack”… for various reasons, but mainly because I can’t remember his name… Jack told us that the computers we were using were stripped down so that it didn’t have games like Minesweeper and Solitaire on them, (as did all the regular Windows NT computers).
The first thing I did when he told us that was to browse over to the electric shop computer through the network and copy the minesweeper and the solitaire games from the computer in the electric shop to my training computer….. See how rotten I used to be (yeah… used to be… Huh? What’s that?)… Then I opened Solitaire and started playing it while they explained how to go into SAP and start doing our jobs.
They showed us the Inventory section. That had all the parts in the company in it. That was the part of the application I had helped implement in our small way.
When they showed us the inventory section, I realized right away how I could break SAP, so I proceeded to open 10 different screens of the SAP client, and began some crazy wildcard searches on each one of them. The application came to a grinding halt. (for any developers reading this… let’s call it… “SQL Injection”).
Linda, who was trying to show us how to go from screen-to-screen suddenly was staring at a screen that was going no where. She tried to explain that they were still having some performance issues with the application….
I just stared at my own computer screen trying to figure out if I had a red ten to put on the black jack…. when a red-faced Jack came around the tables and saw me playing Solitaire. I just smiled up at him and he had a confused look on his face as we waited for the screen on the projector to begin working again.
My screen at the time
I knew of course what had happened and after about 5 minutes of everyone’s screen being locked up, the application finally began working again and the training continued. — I was happy. I had completed my testing that the testing team didn’t think they needed. Of course, I did it to honor Mark Romano’s failed attempt to have me moved to the SAP testing team.
Mark Romano
A couple of years later when I was working with Ray Eberle on a Saturday (as we were working 4 – 10s, and rotated onto a Saturday once every 4 weeks), I showed him how I could lock up SAP for the entire company any time I wanted. Since few people were working on Saturday, I figured I could show him how it was done without causing a raucous. It took about 35 seconds and SAP would be down for as long as I wanted. There was a way to prevent this… but…. If the testers never test it, they would never tell the developers to fix it (I’m sure they have fixed it by now… that was 18 years ago).
Ray Eberle
Anyway, the story about implementing SAP isn’t really what this post is about. It is just the preamble that explains why in the spring of 1997, Linda Dallas left as the Supervisor of HR at our plant. She found another job in Dallas with some of the other core SAP team members implementing SAP.
When the job opening for Linda Dallas’s job came out at our plant, I figured that since I met the minimum qualification, I might as well apply for it. Why not. It would mean putting away my tool bucket and working on the computer a lot more, which was something I was interested in since my experience a few months earlier when I was working at Corporate Headquarters.
I knew right away that no one would really take my job application seriously. I had all the computer related skills. I had a degree in Psychology, and a Masters in Religious Education from Loyola with a focus on adult education. That wasn’t really the point. I had never been a clerk.
The natural progression of things meant that the only “real” possible pool of applicants were the women clerks in the front office. Specifically Louise Kalicki. Her desk was closest to Linda Dallas’s office, so, in a sense, she was “next-in-line”.
Even though I knew that the plant manager Bill Green and Jim Arnold the Maintenance Supervisor would never want me on the “staff”, I went ahead and applied for the job anyway. I figured, it was worth the experience to apply and go through the interview process even though I wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Bill Green
I think Louise and I were the only two to apply for the job. Maybe Linda Shiever did as well, as she had the most seniority at the plant. Linda was actually the first person hired at the plant when it was first built. Louise had been filling in for Linda Dallas for the past year while Linda Dallas had been in Oklahoma City working on SAP, so it was really a “shoe-in” for the job.
When I went up to the interview, the first thing I had to do was take a timed typing test to see if I could type 35 words a minute (I could type 70). I had dressed up for the interview so that when I walked into the plant manager’s office, Bill Green and Jim Arnold had a little “Hee Haw” about seeing me without coal dust and fly ash coming out of my nose and ears. I told them that “I can get cleaned up when I needed to” (notice that I used the word “get” and ended my sentence with a preposition… just so they didn’t think I was too stuck up. See the post: “Power Plant Men Learned Themselves Proper English“).
No one was surprised when Louise Kalicki was promoted to HR Supervisor. She was probably the best choice when you think about it. She had a better relationship with Bill Green and Jim Arnold than I did and a good part of the job was working with those two rascals (oh… did I actually call them rascals? Bless their hearts).
This was right around the time that I had made my decision to go back to school to work toward a degree in Computer Science. Working with computers was really my passion.
I have an interesting way of making decisions about what I’m going to do with my life. I let certain events help make the decisions, instead of just jumping right in. I had decided (knowing that it was pretty much a safe bet) that if I didn’t get the job as the HR Supervisor, then I would go down to Oklahoma State University just a few miles from my house and enroll in the Arts and Science College and work on a degree in Computer Science.
I made a lot of decisions that way. I figured that if I was meant to do something, then it would work out that way. If not, then, fine, I would go a different route.
Ok. One more side story about working with Ray Eberle and SAP (See the post: “Tales of Power Plant Prowess by Ray Eberle“)… This happened some time around the year 2000.
SAP had this icon of a drip of water dropping and causing a ripple of waves….
SAP water drops
When the application was thinking, this picture was in the upper right hand corner and it was animated, so that the water rippled out as the water dripped. That way you could tell the difference between the application being stuck and just thinking.
This wasn’t just an animated GIF as we might have today. It was actually a series of bitmap pictures that were all strung together into one file. Once I figured this out, I used Paint to modify the picture. I created three new versions…. The first one had a small ship with sails sailing across the rippling water. The second one had a yellow fish that would leap out of the water over and over.
It was the third picture that was my masterpiece. I reversed the flow, so that instead of the water rippling out, it came in as if it was a whirlpool sucking things down. Then I added a small picture of our HR Supervisor’s face being sucked down into the whirlpool.
HR Supervisor sucked down a whirlpool
Then I created a small application that allowed people to change their water rippling animated picture to any of the four (with the regular picture being the fourth option) that they wanted quickly and easily. I know the women in the front office liked the one with the HR supervisor being sucked down the whirlpool the best. I won’t mention who they were, but by the following two pictures, you may be able to guess….
Linda Shiever
Darlene Mitchell
I would think that Bill Green would have liked the sailing ship the best since he liked to sail…. though… for some reason, I never made it around to install my “SAP add-on” on his computer (or Louise Kalicki’s for that matter, since she was the HR Supervisor). Most of the Power Plant Men probably would like the fish jumping out of the water, since they liked fishing. — I know… I know… I was being rotten… but it was fun.
Ok. End of the Side Story and end of the post.
Power Plant Men 