Power Plant Train Wreck
Favorites Post #89
Originally posted October 3, 2015
I always loved playing with numbers, and thanks to the Birthday Phantom at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, I knew everyone’s birthdays. So in 1996 I decided that I would chart them all on a graph. When I compiled them all, I found that the Power Plant was in for one heck of a train wreck. The entire basis that enabled the plant the size of a small city to run with a total of 121 employees was going to start crumbling within the next 13 years.
The original chart I made was in pencil. Here is a simple column chart of the employee ages from Excel:
Age of the employees at the Power Plant in 1996
Now study this chart for a minute…. The youngest person in the plant was 31. There was one. The oldest were four who were 56. If you take everyone from age 40 to 49, you have 70 employees, or 58% of the entire Power Plant population. So, in a 10 year period, the plant was going to lose a majority of their employees due to retirement. 35% were going to be retired within a 5 year period.
How did this happen? How is it that the youngest Power Plant Man was 31 years old and the age between the oldest and the youngest was only 26 years? This happened because of two situations.
The first one is that people rarely ever left the Power Plant, so new hires were rare. The second situation was that we had a downsizing in 1988 when the employees 55 and older were early retired. Then in 1994, we had another downsizing where everyone over 50 years old were early retired. So, we kept lopping off the older employees, without a need to hire anyone new.
There were three entry level jobs when I first hired on as a full time employee in 1982. I went through all of them. Summer Help (starting in 1979), Janitor and Laborer. None of these jobs existed at the plant anymore. This had given new employees an introduction into Power Plant Life. It also gave the foremen an opportunity to pick those employees that had the natural “Power Plant Man” quality that was needed to work in this particular environment.
I brought my chart to the team and showed them how a train wreck was just down the road. Someone at Corporate Headquarters must have figured this out, so a couple of things were done to try and combat this situation. I’m sure the same problem must have existed at all of the power plants.
The first thing that was done was that the retirement policy was changed. Instead of having to wait until you were 60 to retire with full benefits, you could retire with full benefits when your age and your years of service added up to 80 or more. A couple of years after that policy went into effect, we calculated that Jim Arnold had 100 points when you added his age and his years of service.
As a side note:
When we added up Gene Day’s years of Service and his age it added up to 80. That’s because, even though he was 80 years old, no one could remember whether he ever did any service…. That’s why I didn’t include him in the chart above.
Gene Day is the one standing on the right with the bright Orange shirt.
Sure. Gene had been hanging around at the Power Plants since they discovered electricity, but it never occurred to him to retire. He just walked around with his orange stapler (an Oklahoma State University fan). Anyway… I digress… Somehow, whenever I talk about being old, Gene Day always seems to pop up in my mind. I can see him waving his finger at me now (In case you’re wondering… read this post: “Power Plant Humor and Joking With Gene Day“, or “Psychological Profile of a Power Plant Control Room Operator“).
Back to the story:
The idea was that we should have people begin to leave the plant now instead of all waiting until they were the regular retirement age, so they could be replaced with younger souls. There was only one catch and the reason why a Power Plant this size could be run with only 121 employees…. well… it had grown to 122 by this time since Brent Kautzman had been hired in the Instrument and Controls department. He was 31 years old when he was hired. I remember his birthday since it was the same date as my parent’s anniversary.
Brent Kautzman
The reason that the Power Plant could operate with so few employees was because the majority of the employees at the plant had many years of experience. The majority of the employees had over 20 years or more with the company. In fact, I had another chart that I had made at the time that showed how many years of experience we would lose each year that we had a large number of people retiring. In just one year we would have lost over 220 years of experience if something hadn’t been done soon.
The company decided to hire young inexperienced employees fresh out of vo-tech and begin training them to work at a power plant. They opened a new position at each of the plants to lead the training efforts. Someone that had some computer skills and could work with employees to help teach them in the ways of Power Plant Maintenance. A training program to head off an impending train wreck.
I won’t go into too much detail about how this worked but it consisted of building a training room where new hires would take computer courses then would work part time in the plant learning how things worked. Then they would take tests and if they passed them, they could move forward with the next part of their training. All they needed were people willing to give it a try with the understanding that if they didn’t pass their tests, they would lose their jobs by a certain time period.
Training Supervisor…. I think that was the name of the job opening that came out in October, 1997. I was ready for this one. I had a Masters in Religious Education from Loyola University in New Orleans, with an emphasis on Adult Education. I was the computer whiz at the plant. I could even write the entire training software from scratch with the help and knowledge of the Power Plant Men and Women.
The only problem with this job was that it was understood that at first the new training supervisor was going to have to be spending a lot of time going between the different plants with the training supervisors at each of the plants. I had just started going back to school at Oklahoma State University to work toward a Computer Science degree. If I had to travel a lot right away, my studies were going to have to be put on hold.
Even though I was looking forward to earning a Computer Science degree in the next four years, I thought that the Training Supervisor job would be a dream job for me, so I applied for it. My education could wait. I interviewed for it with Bill Green, the plant manager, who was the reporting manager for the job.
Bill Green
I explained to him that 50% of the work that I did when studying for my Masters in Religious Education (MRE) was learning techniques on how to teach adults. I had already shown my ability to do this using the computer when I taught the Switchman Training (see the post: “Power Plant Men Learn to Cope with ‘Boring’“). I had also taught almost the entire plant how to use Windows when it first came out.
I had created my own little Windows Manual that stepped people through opening up Microsoft Applications and how to maneuver around.
Here is my instruction manual on how to use Windows
The Windows Icon was actually the Window Wingding character used for the Flying Windows Screensaver. I just added the colors to it.
Most of the people at the plant thought that I was a shoe-in for this job. I was custom designed for it. When the job was given to someone else, I was a little disappointed, but I was also relieved. This meant that I could go on with my work toward my degree. The job was given to Stanley Robbins. Stanley was a coal yard operator, and a very nice person.
One thing I had learned a long time ago with Scott Hubbard was that when someone is given a job that you really want, it isn’t the person who receives the job that should upset you. They were chosen by someone else. Through no fault of their own. This was a terrific opportunity for Stanley.
So, the day that Stanley began his new job, Bill Green was seen showing him around the plant, since he had spent most of his 18 year career up the hill at the coal yard. Stanley and Bill entered the electric shop and Bill asked where we kept the Electric Shop copy of the electrical blueprints. I showed him the cabinets where they were kept. Then they left.
About an hour later, Bill and Stanley returned to the shop and Bill came up to me and said that he had talked to Jerry McCurry in the training department in Oklahoma City (that is Corporate Headquarters), and he was looking for an audio book by Tom Peters, but Jerry said that I had checked it out. He wanted Stanley to read it. I told him that I had returned that audio book a couple of months ago, and now had a different audio book checked out at the time.
I took Bill and Stanley into the Electric Shop office and showed them a copy of a Tom Peters audio book that was my own personal copy “In Search of Excellence”, and gave it to Stanley and told him he was free to borrow it, as well as any of the other “motivational” business books I had, including a textbook on Organizational Behavior that I kept on the top of the filing cabinet to read during lunch when we couldn’t think of a fitting lunch time topic. I had another Tom Peters book on the bookshelf Stanley was free to read, “Thriving on Chaos”:
Thriving on Chaos by Tom Peters
And a book left over from our “Quality Process” days that I had rushed out to buy the day I first heard about it from our Quality instructor:
Out of the Crisis by W. Edward Deming
Bill Green, our Plant Manager, who had never spent much time in the electric shop quickly learned a lot about me in those few minutes that he never knew. What he learned was that I was an avid student of just about anything I could learn. I had read every book in the Electric Company library and was now going through their list of Audio Books. I showed him the library catalog and explained to Stanley how to check out books. — Everything was still done through Intra-Company mail in 1997.
Even though I was intent on being as helpful as I could to Stanley (and I think Stanley would back me up on that. I always supported Stanley any way I could), at the same time I wanted to impress upon Bill Green that if he was really serious about making the Training Supervisor job a real success, he didn’t really pick the most qualified candidate.
With that said, I think Stanley became a great Training Supervisor. He was forever grateful for the opportunity for this position. He stated that to me over and over. I was glad for Stanley.
Stanley Robbins
I was also relieved for myself, because my dream of becoming a “real” programmer was still a possibility. I continued with my school and was able to graduate in 2001. That is another story for a later time.
Six months after the training team had been chosen, and the trainers had settled into their positions, we heard that the company had purchased a specialized “Training Package” for about $400,000. With additional cost for each module that was added. Ray Eberle can tell me the price for each module, but it ran somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 for each one.
Ray Eberle
The training modules included one for each type of equipment in the plant. So, for instance, there was a module for a large vertical pump, and there was one for a large horizontal pump, and one for a small one, etc. Ray knew the prices because he was evaluating the course material for them to see if they were correct.
Ray came up to me one day and said he was embarrassed for the company who was creating the modules, because between a set of modules, they were nothing more than copying and pasting the same incorrect material in each one of them. The set of modules he was reviewing added up to $120,000, and they were all wrong.
I had looked at the application that we had bought and I could easily see that I could have written a much better program with the help of people like Ray and the other Power Plant Men to give me information. We were going to be spending over $750,000 for a computer training program that we could have created ourselves and then the company could have marketed it to other electric companies who were looking for a training program.
After I received my Computer Science degree I spent years working for Dell creating computer applications that performed any sort of feat that was required.
The train wreck finally hit the plant a few years ago, as a mass exodus of retirees left the plant. I wasn’t there to see it, so I don’t know if the plant ended up with a larger group of employees or not. I know that Stanley has retired, but I still picture him at the plant training new hires to become Power Plant Men.
Pain in the Neck Muskogee Power Plant Relay Testing
Favorites Post #23
Originally post 2/21/2015
Don’t let the title fool you. I love testing Power Plant Protective Relays. There is a sense of satisfaction when you have successfully cleaned, calibrated and tested a relay that is going to protect the equipment you have to work on every day. With that said, I was hit with such an unbelievable situation when testing Muskogee Relays in 1995 that I was left with a serious pain in the neck.
On August 14, 2003 the electric power in the Northeast United States and Canada went out. The Blackout lasted long enough to be a major annoyance for those in the that region of the United States.
Map of the power blackout in 2003
When I heard about how the blackout had moved across the region, I immediately knew what had happened. I was quickly reminded of the following story. I told my wife Kelly, “I know exactly why such a large area lost power! They hadn’t done proper preventative maintenance on the Protective Relays in the substations! Just like….” Well…. I’ll tell you that part now:
I have mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that something always seemed a little “off” at the Muskogee Power Plant. I had decided early on that while working there I would stick to drinking sodas instead of water. See the post: “Something is in the Water at the Muskogee Power Plant“. Even with that knowledge, I was still shocked at what I found while testing relays at the plant.
This story really begins one Sunday at Muskogee when one of the Auxiliary Operators was making his rounds inspecting equipment. He was driving his truck around the south edge of the Unit 6 parking lot on the service road. He glanced over at a pump next to the road, and at first, he thought he was just seeing things. After stopping the truck and backing up for a second glance, he was sure he wasn’t dreaming. It’s just that what he was seeing seemed so strange, he wasn’t sure what was happening.
The operator could see what appeared to be silver paint chips popping off of the large pump motor in all directions. After closer examination, he figured out that the motor was burning up. It was still running, but it had become so hot that the paint was literally burning off of the motor.
Like this Horizontal pump only much bigger and painted silver
A motor like this would get hot if the bearings shell out. Before the motor is destroyed, the protective relays on the breaker in the 4,000 Volt switchgear shuts the motor off. In this case, the relay hadn’t tripped the motor, so, it had become extremely hot and could have eventually exploded if left running. The operator shut the motor down and wrote a work order for the electricians.
Doyle Fullen was the foreman in the electric shop that received the work order. When he looked into what had happened, he realized that the protective relay had not been inspected for a couple of years for this motor.
I couldn’t find a picture of Doyle. In his youth he reminds me of a very smart Daryl in Walking Dead:
Norman Reedus from Walking Dead
In fact, since before the downsizing in 1994, none of the Protective Relays at the plant had been inspected. The person that had been inspecting the relays for many years had moved to another job or retired in 1994. This was just a warning shot across the bow that could have had major consequences.
No one at Muskogee had been trained to test Protective Relays since the downsizing, so they reached out to our plant in North Central Oklahoma for help. That was when I was told that I was going to be going to Muskogee during the next overhaul (outage). I had been formally trained to inspect, clean, calibrate and test Protective Relays with two of my Power Plant Heroes, Ben Davis and Sonny Kendrick years earlier. See the post: “Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis“.
My Protective Relay Maintenance course book
Without going into too much detail about the actual tests we performed as I don’t want to make this a long rambling post (like… well…. like most of my posts…..I can already tell this is going to be a long one), I will just say that I took our antiquated relay tester down to Muskogee to inspect their relays and teach another electrician Charles Lay, how to perform those tests in the future. Muskogee had a similar Relay Test Set. These were very outdated, but they did everything we needed, and it helped you understand exactly what was going on when you don’t have a newfangled Relay Test Set.
AVO Multi-Amp SR-76 Relay Test Set
You need to periodically test both mechanical and electronic protective relays. In the electronic relays the components change their properties slightly over time, changing the time it takes to trip a breaker under a given circumstance (we’re talking about milliseconds). In the mechanical relays (which I have always found to be more reliable), they sit inside a black box all the time, heating up and cooling as the equipment is used. Over time, the varnish on the copper coils evaporates and settles on all the components. This becomes sticky so that the relay won’t operate at the point where it should.
A panel of Protective Relays
In the picture above, the black boxes on the top, middle and right are mechanical relays. This means that something actually has to turn or pick up in order to trip the equipment. The electronic relays may have a couple of small relays, but for the most part, they are made up of transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes.
So, with all that said, let me start the real story…. gee…. It’s about time…
So, here I am sitting in the electric shop lab just off of the Unit 6 T-G floor. We set up all the equipment and had taken a couple of OverCurrent relays out of some high voltage breakers in the switchgear. I told Charles that before you actually start testing the relays, you need to have the test documents from the previous test and we also needed the instruction manuals for each of the relays because the manuals will have the diagrams that you use to determine the exact time that the relays should trip for each of the tests. So, we went up to the print room to find the old tests and manuals. Since they weren’t well organized, we just grabbed the entire folder where all the relays tests were kept since Unit 6 had been in operation.
When we began testing the relays at first I thought that the relay test set wasn’t working correctly. Here I was trying to impress my new friend, Charles Lay, a 63 year old highly religious fundamental Christian that I knew what I was doing, and I couldn’t even make a relay trip. I was trying to find the “As Found” tripping level. That is, before you clean up the relay. Just like you found it. Only, it wouldn’t trip.
It turned out that the relay was stuck from the varnish as I explained above. It appeared as if the relay hadn’t been tested or even operated for years. The paperwork showed that it had been tested three years earlier. Protective Relays should be tested at least every two years, but I wouldn’t have thought that the relay would be in such a bad condition in just three years. It had been sitting in a sealed container to keep out dust. But it was what it was.
I told Charles that in order to find the “As Found” point where the relay would trip, we would need to crank up the test set as high as needed to find when it actually did trip. It turned out that the relay which should have instantaneously tripped somewhere around 150 amps wouldn’t have tripped until the motor was pulling over 4,000 amps. I could tell right away why the Auxiliary Operator found that motor burning up without tripping. The protective relays were stuck.
As it turned out… almost all of the 125 or so relays were in the same condition. We cleaned them all up and made them operational.
There is an overcurrent relay for the main bus on each section of a main switchgear.
A picture of a clean switchgear. Picture 6 rows of switchgear like this
When I tested the “As Found” instantaneous trip for the main bus relay, I found that it was so high that the Unit 6 Main Turbine Generator would have melted down before the protective relay would have tripped the power to that one section of switchgear. The entire electric bus would have been nothing but molten metal by that time.
As I tested each of these relays, I kept shaking my head in disbelief. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The mystery as to why these relays were all glued shut by varnish was finally solved, and that reason was even more unbelievable.
Here is what I found….. The first thing you do when you are going to test a relay is that you fill out a form that includes all the relay information, such as, what it is for, what are the settings on the relay, and what are the levels of tests that you are going to perform on it. You also include a range of milliseconds that are acceptable for the relay for each of the tests. Normally, you just copy what was used in the previous test, because you need to include the time it took for the Previous “As Left” test on your form. That is why we needed the forms from the previous test.
So, I had copied the information from the previous test form and began testing the relay (one of the first overcurrent relays we tested)… Again… I was a 34 year old teacher trying to impress my 63 year old student. So, I was showing him how you mechanically adjust the relay in order for it to trip within the acceptable range. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t adjust the relay so that it would even be close to the desired range for the longer time trip times…. like the 2 second to 25 second range. It wasn’t even close to the range that was on the form from the last test.
The form from the last test showed that the relay was in the right range for all the levels of test. When I tested it, like I said, it wasn’t even close. So, I went to the diagram in the instruction manual for this type of relay. The diagram looks similar to this one used for thermal overloads:
Thermal Overload Tripping curves
See all those red lines? Well, when you setup a relay, you have a dial where you set the range depending on the needs for the type of motor you are trying to trip. Each red line represents each setting on the dial. Most of the relays were set on the same number, so we would be using the same red line on the diagram to figure out at different currents how long it should take for a relay to trip….
Here is the clincher….The time range that was written on the previous form wasn’t for the correct relay setting. The person that tested the relay had accidentally looked at the wrong red line. — That in itself is understandable, since it could be easy to get on the wrong line… The only thing is that as soon as you test the relay, you would know that something is wrong, because the relay wouldn’t trip in that range, just like I had found.
I double and triple checked everything to make sure we were looking at the same thing. The previous form indicated the same settings on the relay as now, yet, the time ranges were for a different line! — Ok. I know. I have bored you to tears with all this stuff about time curves and overcurrent trips… so I will just tell you what this means…
This meant that when the person completed the forms the last time, they didn’t test the relays at all. They just filled out the paperwork. They put in random values that were in the acceptable range and sat around in the air conditioned lab during the entire overhaul smoking his pipe. — Actually, I don’t remember if he smoked a pipe or not. He was the Electrical Specialist for the plant. I remembered seeing him sitting in the lab with a relay hooked up to the test set throughout the entire overhaul when I had been there during previous overhauls, but I realized finally that he never tested the relays. He didn’t even go so far as try to operate them.
I went back through the records to when the plant was first “checked out”. Doyle Fullen had done the check out on the relays and the test after that. Doyle had written the correct values from the manual on his forms. I could see where he had actually performed the tests on the relays and was getting the same values I was finding when I tested the relays, so I was certain that I wasn’t overlooking anything.
As I tested each of the relays, I kept shaking my head in disbelief. It was so unbelievable. How could someone do such a thing? Someone could have been killed because a protective relay wasn’t working correctly. This was serious stuff.
One day while Charles and I were working away on the relays, Jack Coffman, the Superintendent of all the Power Plants came walking through the lab. He asked us how we were doing. I swiveled around in my chair to face him and I said, “Pretty good, except for this pain in my neck” as I rubbed the back of my neck.
Jack stopped and asked me what happened. I told him that I had been shaking my head in disbelief for the last two weeks, and it gave me a pain in the neck. Of course, I knew this would get his attention, so he asked, “Why?” I went through all the details of what I had found.
I showed him how since the time that Doyle Fullen last tested the relays more than 10 years earlier, these relays hadn’t been tested at all. I showed him how the main bus relays were so bad that it would take over 100,000 amps to have tripped the 7100 KV switchgear bus or 710 Megawatts! More power than the entire generator could generate. The main generator was only rated at about 550 Megawatts at the most.
Jack stood there looking off into space for a few seconds, and then walked out the door…. I thought I saw him shaking his head as he left. Maybe he was just looking both ways for safety reasons, but to me, it looked like a shake of disbelief. I wonder if I had given him the same pain in the neck.
That is really the end of the relay story, but I do want to say a few words about Charles Lay. He was a hard working electrician that was nearing retirement. People would come around to hear us discussing religion. I am Catholic, and he went to a Fundamental Christian Church. We would debate the differences between our beliefs and just Christian beliefs in general. We respected each other during our time together, even though he was sure I am going to hell when I die.
People would come in just to hear our discussion for a while as we were cleaning and calibrating the relays. One day Charles asked me if I could help him figure out how much he was going to receive from his retirement from the electric company. He had only been working there for three years. Retirement at that time was determined by your years of service. So, three years didn’t give him too much.
When I calculated his amount, he was upset. He said, “Am I going to have to work until I die?” I said, “Well, there’s always your 401k and Social Security.” He replied that he can’t live on Social Security. I said, “Well, there’s your 401k.” He asked, “What’s that?” (oh. not a good sign).
I explained that it was a retirement plan where you are able to put money in taxed deferred until you take it out when you retire. He said, “Oh. I never put anything in something like that.” My heart just sank as I looked in his eyes. He had suddenly realized that he wasn’t going to receive a retirement like those around him who had spent 35 years working in the Power Plant.
When I left the plant after teaching Charles Lay how to test the relays, that was the last time I ever saw him. I don’t know what became of Charles. I figure he would be 83 years old today. I wonder if he finally retired when he reached the 80 points for your age and years of service. He would have never reached enough years of service to receive a decent amount of retirement from the Electric Company since he didn’t start working there until he was 60 years old. That is, unless he’s still working there now.
As I said earlier in this post, Charles Lay was a very good worker. He always struck me as the “Hardworking type”. I often think about the time we spent together, especially when I hear about a power blackout somewhere. — A word of caution to Power Companies…. keep your protective relays in proper working condition. Don’t slack off on the Preventative Maintenance. — I guess that’s true for all of us… isn’t it? Don’t slack off on Preventative Maintenance in all aspects of your life.
Added note: On 7/6/2019, 3 weeks after re-posting this story, look what happened: Con Edison says cause of NYC blackout was substation’s faulty relay protection system
Comments from previous posts:
Great story! And I don’t mind the lengthy technical stuff. I like it.
We bought our current house in 2004. It was built in 1983. About 4 years ago we lost power to the GFI outlet in our “guest” bathroom and to an outlet in the “Florida room”. I replaced the GFI, but that didn’t fix anything. The power to the GFI was off. The affected bathroom was used very little, so it wasn’t a big deal. In the “Florida room” we just ran an extension cord from a different outlet and went on. I just assumed that a mouse or squirrel in the attack had messed with the wiring. Maybe I had pulled some wiring lose when I was crawling in the attic. Last December, I finally “bit the bullet” and called an electrician. What he found was a GFI in another bathroom had been wired backwards. It was wired in series with the GFI in the other bathroom. The mis-wired GFI had tripped but it didn’t cut the power to it’s own outlet. It only cut power to the other bathroom GFI and the “Florida room” outlet. It cost me $80 to re-learn what I had learned long ago – “Never assume previous work was does correctly – even if done by a “professional””.
KB,
I suppose the old timers knew more about this! not sure as in they had a saying at relief time between shifts No sparks out of any motors, no paint burning off any bearings, the truck is in the parking spot and filled with gas, all in all had a smooth shift! LOL! What would fascinate me was the mill fires in the early days – you go down there and here is this whole thing cherry red glowing! unbelievable! I have been over to said plant a few times and their switch gears were pretty dirty typically ours were aways very clean and the breakers always worked very well, very reliable and dependable.
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Yeah. That was the first thing I noticed about Muskogee. Our plant took more pride in keeping things clean. To be fair, the Muskogee plant was close to the coal pile and the plant was down wind. So coal dust would blow right into the plant covering everything.
Charles came to our Plant and Calibrated Relays on Unit #1 in Sept. of 2011. Brought his wife with him and called it a working vacation. Still a very nice and intelligent man.
This is bringing back the memories. Worked in a coal fired plant for many years as a T.A. (Technicians Assistant) doing the protection maintenance and even the commissioning of a new power station for a couple of years in Australia.
And I agree, it is a place that gets in your blood. And as you are attesting here, some of the stories are unbelievable.
And I must put in my bit about those AVO multi Amp test sets. The day that we received one they were affectionately known as the ‘T.A.’s’. Apparently they could be relied on to not make a mistake (unlike the occasional human 🙂 ), and give correct settings. Us human T.A.’s were told, ‘if they could have made coffee they would have sacked the lot of us!’ 😀
Great story Plant Electrician, a good throwback to yesteryear. I wonder with all the computer gear they now have what has become of the technicians. It’s all probably digitised and in constant readouts to a computer test panel somewhere. One technician probably does all testing from a clean, air-conditioned room somewhere 🙂
Telling Time Power Plant Man Style
Originally posted November 1, 2013:
You would think that telling time is a pretty universal past time. I used to think that myself. That is, until I went to work at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma when I first went to work there in 1979 as a summer help. I noticed something was different when I walked into the office to meet the Assistant Plant Manager, Bill Moler and the clock on his wall looked kind of funny. I had to stare at it for a moment before I realized what it meant:
24 hour clock
The Power Plant Men called it Military Time because many of them had been in the military during the Vietnam War and had learned to tell time using this type of clock. When we filled out our timecards at the end of the day we put 0800 to 1600 Well. I put in the colons like this: 8:00 to 16:00 but that wasn’t the real Power Plant Man way to do it.
That wasn’t the only thing I learned about Power Plant Man time. Power Plant Men keep time in other ways. One of those ways, though it involves a clock, the time being observed isn’t the time of day. Instead it centers around five events.
Startin’ Time, Morning Break, Lunch Time and Afternoon Break and Quitin’ Time. A Power Plant Man’s day revolves around these events.
The moment Startin’ Time begins, the Power Plant Men are looking forward to Morning Break. They schedule their efforts around this event. That is, if they need to do a certain job that would run them into Morning Break, then they figure out something else to do, and push that event out until Morning Break is over.
In General, Morning Break would begin at 9:30 (Oh. I mean 0930 — pronounced “Oh Nine Thirty”). It was supposed to be 15 minutes long, but in order to make sure you didn’t miss your break, you usually headed toward the shop 15 minutes early. Then by the time you headed back out the door to and returned to your work, another 10 to 15 minutes went by. Essentially stretching morning break from 15 minutes to 40 to 45 minutes.
This was especially true in the early days of the Power Plant. The Power Plant Men’s culture evolved over time so that the actual time spent on their 15 minute break probably shortened from 45 minutes to 30 minutes.
The idea that the employees weren’t spending every moment of their day when not on break working just confounded Plant Managers, such as the “Evil Plant Manager” that I often talk about. Our first plant manager was so tight, when he worked at a gas plant in Oklahoma City, he was known for taking rags out of the trash and putting them back in the rag box because they weren’t dirty enough.
Now that I work at Dell as a Business Systems Analyst (and since I first wrote this post, I have changed jobs and now work for General Motors) after many years of working for great managers and not-so-great managers, I am always relieved when I find that a new manager doesn’t measure you by how many hours you are sitting at the computer, but by your results.
For those that looked closely at the performance of the Power Plant Men at our particular plant, they would find that when a job needed to be done, it would be done… on time. The bottom line was that when you treat the employees with respect, they go the extra mile for you.
“Quitin’ Time” was always an interesting time. From the first day that I arrived as a summer help (1979) until the day I left 22 years later (2001), Even though “Quitin’ Time” was at 4:30 (or 1630, later changing to 1730), it really began at 4:00 (or 1600, pronounced “sixteen hundred”).
at 4:00, a half hour before it was time to go out to the parking lot and drive home, everyone would return to the shop, where they would spend the next 30 minutes cleaning up and filling out their daily timecard. The timecard was, and probably still is, a sheet of paper.
A Daily timecard similar to this
Amazing huh? You would think with the way things are that paper timecards would have disappeared a long time ago. I could be wrong about that. If it is any different at the plant today, I’ll encourage one of them to leave a comment below updating me.
There are other ways that Power Plant Men tell time. Sure, they know that there are seasons, like Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. But it is more likely that in their minds the Power Plant Men are thinking more like this…. Instead of Summer, they would think that this is “Peak Load”. That is, the units need to stay operational because the citizens of this country are in dire need of air conditioning.
Instead of Fall, there are two thoughts running through a Power Plant Man’s mind…. Hunting Season and the start of “Overhauls”.
As hunting season nears, many Power Plant Men are staking out their territories and setting up their deer stands. Some are out practicing with their bows as Bow Season starts first before you can use a rifle. The Plant staff didn’t like their employees taking off Christmas vacation, and did everything they could to keep you in town during the holiday. But when it came down to it… The real time to worry was during hunting season.
An Overhaul is when you take one of the units offline to work on things that you can’t work on when it is running. the main area being inside the boiler. When overhauls come around, it is a chance for working a lot of overtime. The pay is good especially if you get to go to another plant to work because then you not only get to work 10 or 12 hour days, but you receive a Per Diem of somewhere from $28.50 to $35.00 each day depending on how far back you want to look.
I don’t know what the Per Diem is today. I’m sure it must be much higher. Plus you get driving time back and forth each week, and you also receive mileage! So, you can see why Power Plant Men were often very anxious to go away on overhaul.
Overhaul season ran from the Fall into the Spring. It is during that time when the electric company could take a couple of units offline at a time because the electric demand wasn’t so high.
Another season that many Power Plant Men counted on was “Fishing Season”. It wasn’t like the other seasons, because it kind of ran into a lot of the others. If the weather was right, and the rain was right and the Missus was all right with it… Then it was fishing season. There were different types of fishing. In the electric shop, “Noodling” was popular. That is when you reach under the rocks in a river and feel around for a fish and then end up catching it with your bare hands.
Here is a picture I found on Google Images of someone that noodled an over-sized catfish
Another timekeeping tool used by Power Plant men was “Pay Day”. It came around every two weeks. After a while everyone was on direct deposit, so it wasn’t like they were all waiting around for someone to actually hand them a paycheck. Many did plan their trips to the mall or to the gun shows in Oklahoma City around Pay Day. It was common to live from paycheck to paycheck.
If you worked in the coalyard, then you calibrated your clock by when the next coal train was going to roll into the dumper. There was generally a steady stream of coal trains coming and going. When a coal train was late, or even early, then I think it seemed to throw some coalyard hands into a state of confusion. But, then again, now that I think about it…. Walt Oswalt usually did seem to be in a state of confusion. — I’m just joking of course….. Well… you know…
If you were a Control Room Operator, then you were in a sort of Twilight Zone, because there really was only one small window in the entire Control room and that was only so that you could look through a small telescope at the Main Power Substation in case…. well… in case you were bored and you needed to be reassured that the world still did exist out there.
In the control room, there were clocks, but the control room operators had a lot more pretty lights to look at back then. Here is my favorite picture of a Power Plant Control Room (not the one where I worked):
I love this picture!
See all those lights? Now everything is on the computer. That way if some foreign terrorist group decides they want to shut down the electric grid, all they have to do is hack into the system and down it goes. They couldn’t do that when the control room looked like this.
It seemed that being in the control room was out of time. It didn’t matter what time of the day you went in the control room. In the morning, the afternoon, even at two in morning. It always seemed the same. There were always two control room operators sitting or standing at their posts. The Shift Supervisor was sitting in his office, or was standing somewhere nearby. Other operators were walking in and out going on their rounds. I think the Control Room operators only knew that it was time to go home because the next shift would show up to take their place.
Electricians on the other hand, had their own kind of timekeeping. Well, not all of them… ok…. well… maybe just me…. I used an oscilloscope a lot when I was working on the precipitator controls, and so very small amounts of time meant a lot to me. For instance… The regular 60 cycle electricity in your house goes from zero to about 134 volts and then back to zero about every 8 and 1/3 thousands of a second (or .00833333…).
I used an Analog oscilloscope like this until we were given a new Digital one where you could zoom in and do all sorts of neat things.
I will talk about it later, but when you are testing tripping relays, even as little as one thousandth of a second can be important. So, telling time with an oscilloscope can vary widely.
Then there were those timekeeping Power Plant Men that kept time by how long it was going to be to retirement. It was more of a countdown. I remember one Power Plant Man saying that he only had 21 more years and then he was outta there. An even more sad story was when Charles Lay at Muskogee who was 63 asked me to figure out his retirement because he wanted to retire in 2 years. Well….. sad to say… He had only been working there for 3 or so years, so his retirement package wasn’t going to be much and had never put anything into a 401k or an IRA.
Those who spent their lives working at the plant were able to retire with great benefits. It wasn’t like a union with all the healthcare and stuff, but the company did offer a very good retirement plan for those that had been there for the long haul. I suppose at this point they are measuring time in terms of their lifetime.
What it boils down to is that some Power Plant Men measured their life one-day-at-a-time, while others just looked at the entire time of their life as one time. Some looked forward to a time when they would be able to rest, while others enjoyed their work each day.
When I think about time, I realize that an infinite number of things can take place each second. Yet, a lifetime can go by without ever grasping what is important and what is fleeting. When I think back at the time that I spent working at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, what I feel is that I was blessed by the presence of such great men and women and it was time well spent.
Comments from Original Post:
From Pioneers to Power Plant Managers
Originally posted December 28, 2013:
Times were changing in 1987 when the electric company in Oklahoma decided that they needed to downsize the company in order to change with the new business environment. I always seemed to think that the executives down at corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City knew that the old pioneers in charge of the Power Plants would be very difficult customers when it came to the new business model.
Like I said…. Times were changing. The digital era was being introduced to the power industry. We had already upgraded the precipitator controls to make them computerized. Other areas of the plant were going to be next. Especially the employees. Of course, none of us knew that quite yet, except Bill Rivers, who was a natural visionary, and he was gone.
Side story time:
I had always been interested in computers and programming from the time I was a sophomore in High School when I had just turned 15 years old. My friend Jesse Cheng had introduced me to one of the first programmable calculators, the HP-25.
The HP-25 calculator
This was the most wonderful Christmas present I had ever received. I literally felt myself fainting when I opened the present and found that I had been given a pair of cowboy boots, only to find an HP-25 calculator inside when I opened it up. Ralphie had nothing on me that day.
It was much like the Christmas Story with Ralphie. I had tried every with way to convince my parents that using a slide rule in High School was passe (pronounced “pass A”). All the other students in my advanced chemistry class were using calculators, and I was still stuck with my dad’s old circular slide rule. It was a pretty neat one, I’ll grant you that, but it just… well….. I could work things out on paper faster than I could use the slide rule.
The Gilson Atlas circular slide rule I used in High School
I introduced my friend Jesse Cheng in the post “Why Do Power Plant Men Always Lose the Things They Love Most“. He had an HP-25 calculator and had loaned it to me to take a Chemistry test. He showed me how it used Reverse Polish Notation, which is different than a normal calculator, but more like a computer.
The calculator could be programmed with 49 steps. Because it had a stack built right into it, and the reason it used Reversed Polish Notation, we could create all sorts of games with just those 49 steps. The book that came with the calculator had a moon landing game. We made more sophisticated games, like one called Battleship.
Anyway. Because of this early exposure with actually programming something in a logical manner, I was eager to learn more about programming. During college, my calculator was often sitting on my desk in the dorm room running a long program to help me perfect a random number generator. Finally in my Junior year in college, my calculator was completely fried.
After I was married at the end of 1985, I began subscribing to a magazine called “Compute”. It had actual programs in it in Basic. I would read the programs to learn how it worked, but at that point, I didn’t own a computer, so all I could do was dream about writing programs.
It wasn’t until Thanksgiving 1987 when I went to visit my ol’ friend Jesse Cheng in Columbia, Missouri who was interning as a medical doctor that I felt a sudden need to have a computer of my own. He had built a computer using a Heath Kit and we used it to play two computer games. One was called Starflight:
Starflight by Electronic Arts
The other was called F15 Strike Eagle:
F-15 Strike Eagle by Microprose
When I returned home I was pretty eager to buy a computer. Up until that time, every time my wife and I had gone to the mall, I always had stopped in the computer stores to look at the latest computers. I never had really considered buying one. But now, they had 20 megabyte hard drives! And you could play these terrific games like Starflight and F-15 Strike Eagle.
So, one day after we had left the mall, and my wife could see the look on my face, she finally said…. “Why don’t you go and buy one?” I asked her, “Are you sure? Because you know what is going to happen if I get a computer. I’ll be playing on it all the time.” She said, “No. I want you to go buy one.” So we turned around and went back to the mall.
That was the start of my journey into the world of computers.
End of Side Story.
As I explained in the post “Boppin’ with Bif during the Power Plant Downsizing“, the company offered an early retirement package for everyone 55 years old and older. They would give them full benefits to leave. This meant that our Electrical Supervisor, Leroy Godfrey, as well as the assistant plant manager, Bill Moler and the Plant Manager, Eldon Waugh were all going to retire some time in August 1987.
We had a retirement party for Leroy Godfrey out in the country at Diana Brien’s house. A bunch of the electricians were there including Mark Meeks, who Leroy knew at the time was the one that was going to be laid off. Mark commented about that later when he was told that he was losing his job that Leroy had sat there and smiled at him while we were at the party. Mark knew Leroy didn’t like him, but hadn’t expected to be the one to go since everyone thought it would be Gary Wehunt, since he was the newest member in the shop.
I explained in the post, “The Passing of an Old School Power Plant Man — Leroy Godfrey” what Leroy’s management style was like. It was very top-down, if you know what I mean. It was like, “Because I told you so.” No need to explain anything. That was the world of Power Plant Management up to that point.
I think Corporate Headquarters realized that this needed to change in order for the company to compete in a world where electric companies could no longer count on the Corporation Commission to guarantee a sustainable electric rate or even a set number of customers. The world of electric power was changing rapidly and the company needed to move on from the mentality that it could be run like a “good ol’ boys” club.
It is easier to teach young dogs new tricks than older and crankier ones. It looked to me like this was a logical choice when looking back using hindsight. I think the company was making a bold move. I don’t think they really had much of a choice if they wanted to survive.
So, we had the main retirement party at the plant where people stood up and told stories about the old guys that were retiring. Nothing much happened there except the part where Leroy Godfrey’s daughter stood up and said that we just had to work with him, while she had to live with him… see the post about Leroy above for the full story about that.
Then the following Monday. I believe it was August 17, 1987, everyone was told to meet in the main break room for a meeting with our new management. That was when we were introduced to our new plant manager, Ron Kilman.
I remember a certain part of the meeting very well. Ron said something funny. It didn’t matter exactly what he said. I don’t even remember what it was. Probably something self-deprecating. I leaned over to Charles Foster, who had been my foreman for a while (on that day, it was officially Andy Tubbs). I said, “I didn’t know Plant Managers could tell jokes!”
Charles looked back at me and I raised my eyebrows and tilted my head while the corners of my mouth went down. — This was one of the signals I had learned while carpooling with Bud Schoonover when I needed to communicate with Dick Dale without saying anything out loud (see the post: Carpooling with Bud Schoonover“. This particular expression meant, “Maybe this won’t be such a bad thing.”
Ron Kilman remained the plant manager at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma for the next 7 years. The stories that I will post during this next year will all be at least partially from this time period. During this time, there were some decisions that Ron made that I applauded, and others that even he would admit he wished he hadn’t made.
All in all, I think that Ron has a good heart and that those times when he did make a rash decision, it was evident that he was falling back to his “management training” and not managing from his heart. Old School management training left a lot to be desired.
During the 7 years from 1987 to 1994, the power plant saw a lot of changes. Some I have alluded to already. Such as the move to computerize everything. The other was a total change in how management works. Or at least that was the attempt.
People were willing to step out of their regular day-to-day jobs and try new things that they thought would help the plant. Many of these things were successful. Some of them failed, but not so miserably as they would have if the earlier management had been around. The employees felt as if they had more of a say in how the plant ran instead of feeling like they were just a bunch of tools running around fixing things.
I have a quote from Ron Kilman that said it all one day after a catastrophe had occurred. It summed up his management style as opposed to his assistant manager, Ben Brandt. I will relay the exact story later, but for now I’ll just say that when Ben Brandt saw what happened, the first thing that he said was, “Who did this?” When Ron Kilman saw what had happened, the first thing he said was, “How can we prevent this from happening again?”
Ben’s approach was from the old school of thought. Blame and punish the culprit. Later when we were drastically changing the way process improvements took place, my favorite quote from Ben Brandt is, “I am the obstacle! We aren’t going to change because I say so.” We all had to agree. He was definitely the obstacle.
Ron’s approach was one more like a leader. “Let’s get the job done right.” Sure, he is human, so the decisions weren’t always perfect, but I think in general, he was leading where other people may have been dragging.
Well… I will say no more for now… I look forward to writing stories about this time period during this next year. I’m sure there are a lot of those at the plant just as eager to see how I portray the different events that took place during this time.
Comments from the original post:
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HP 25? The only model older is Fred Flintstone’s bird chiseling into rock tablet!
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One day, a fellow operator and I brought in our old slide rules, just to show. Not the round one like yours, but straight and mine had a leather case. A young engineer came hurrying through the control room and said, “I need a calculator – QUICK!” so I handed him my leather case & he ran out, about 30 seconds later he came back with a puzzled look on his face & said “No, I don’t need to MEASURE something, I need to CALCULATE something” We all had a hearty laugh!
Comments from the last repost:
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I loved the old Heath Kits. I built a 14 watt amplifier and an AM/FM receiver that I used for years (both were the tube type – pre-transistor). It was always satisfying to invest a few hours, save a few dollars, learn some new skills, and enjoy a product you couldn’t buy at a store.
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I still have my 25. It still works.
Pain in the Neck Muskogee Power Plant Relay Testing
Don’t let the title fool you. I love testing Power Plant Protective Relays. There is a sense of satisfaction when you have successfully cleaned, calibrated and tested a relay that is going to protect the equipment you have to work on every day. With that said, I was hit with such an unbelievable situation when testing Muskogee Relays in 1995 that I was left with a serious pain in the neck.
On August 14, 2003 the electric power in the Northeast United States and Canada went out. The Blackout lasted long enough to be a major annoyance for those in the that region of the United States.
Map of the power blackout in 2003
When I heard about how the blackout had moved across the region, I immediately knew what had happened. I was quickly reminded of the following story. I told my wife Kelly, “I know exactly why such a large area lost power! They hadn’t done proper preventative maintenance on the Protective Relays in the substations! Just like….” Well…. I’ll tell you that part now:
I have mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that something always seemed a little “off” at the Muskogee Power Plant. I had decided early on that while working there I would stick to drinking sodas instead of water. See the post: “Something’s In the Water at the Muskogee Power Plant“. Even with that knowledge, I was still shocked at what I found while testing relays at the plant.
This story really begins one Sunday at Muskogee when one of the Auxiliary Operators was making his rounds inspecting equipment. He was driving his truck around the south edge of the Unit 6 parking lot on the service road. He glanced over at a pump next to the road, and at first, he thought he was just seeing things. After stopping the truck and backing up for a second glance, he was sure he wasn’t dreaming. It’s just that what he was seeing seemed so strange, he wasn’t sure what was happening.
The operator could see what appeared to be silver paint chips popping off of the large pump motor in all directions. After closer examination, he figured out that the motor was burning up. It was still running, but it had become so hot that the paint was literally burning off of the motor.
Like this Horizontal pump only much bigger and painted silver
A motor like this would get hot if the bearings shell out. Before the motor is destroyed, the protective relays on the breaker in the 4,000 Volt switchgear shuts the motor off. In this case, the relay hadn’t tripped the motor, so, it had become extremely hot and could have eventually exploded if left running. The operator shut the motor down and wrote a work order for the electricians.
Doyle Fullen was the foreman in the electric shop that received the work order. When he looked into what had happened, he realized that the protective relay had not been inspected for a couple of years for this motor.
I couldn’t find a picture of Doyle. In his youth he reminds me of a very smart Daryl in Walking Dead:
Norman Reedus from Walking Dead
In fact, since before the downsizing in 1994, none of the Protective Relays at the plant had been inspected. The person that had been inspecting the relays for many years had moved to another job or retired in 1994. This was just a warning shot across the bow that could have had major consequences.
No one at Muskogee had been trained to test Protective Relays since the downsizing, so they reached out to our plant in North Central Oklahoma for help. That was when I was told that I was going to be going to Muskogee during the next overhaul (outage). I had been formally trained to inspect, clean, calibrate and test Protective Relays with two of my Power Plant Heroes, Ben Davis and Sonny Kendrick years earlier. See the post: “Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis“.
My Protective Relay Maintenance course book
Without going into too much detail about the actual tests we performed as I don’t want to make this a long rambling post (like… well…. like most of my posts…..I can already tell this is going to be a long one), I will just say that I took our antiquated relay tester down to Muskogee to inspect their relays and teach another electrician Charles Lay, how to perform those tests in the future. Muskogee had a similar Relay Test Set. These were really outdated, but they did everything we needed, and it helped you understand exactly what was going on when you don’t have a newfangled Relay Test Set.
AVO Multi-Amp SR-76 Relay Test Set
You need to periodically test both mechanical and electronic protective relays. In the electronic relays the components change their properties slightly over time, changing the time it takes to trip a breaker under a given circumstance (we’re talking about milliseconds). In the mechanical relays (which I have always found to be more reliable), they sit inside a black box all the time, heating up and cooling as the equipment is used. Over time, the varnish on the copper coils evaporates and settles on all the components. This becomes sticky so that the relay won’t operate at the point where it should.
A panel of Protective Relays
In the picture above, the black boxes on the top, middle and right are mechanical relays. This means that something actually has to turn or pick up in order to trip the equipment. The electronic relays may have a couple of small relays, but for the most part, they are made up of transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes.
So, with all that said, let me start the real story…. gee…. It’s about time…
So, here I am sitting in the electric shop lab just off of the Unit 6 T-G floor. We set up all the equipment and had taken a couple of OverCurrent relays out of some high voltage breakers in the switchgear. I told Charles that before you actually start testing the relays, you need to have the test documents from the previous test and we also needed the instruction manuals for each of the relays because the manuals will have the diagrams that you use to determine the exact time that the relays should trip for each of the tests. So, we went up to the print room to find the old tests and manuals. Since they weren’t well organized, we just grabbed the entire folder where all the relays tests were kept since Unit 6 had been in operation.
When we began testing the relays at first I thought that the relay test set wasn’t working correctly. Here I was trying to impress my new friend, Charles Lay, a 63 year old highly religious fundamental Christian that I knew what I was doing, and I couldn’t even make a relay trip. I was trying to find the “As Found” tripping level. That is, before you clean up the relay. Just like you found it. Only, it wouldn’t trip.
It turned out that the relay was stuck from the varnish as I explained above. It appeared as if the relay hadn’t been tested or even operated for years. The paperwork showed that it had been tested three years earlier. Protective Relays should be tested at least every two years, but I wouldn’t have thought that the relay would be in such a bad condition in just three years. It had been sitting in a sealed container to keep out dust. But it was what it was.
I told Charles that in order to find the “As Found” point where the relay would trip, we would need to crank up the test set as high as needed to find when it actually did trip. It turned out that the relay which should have instantaneously tripped somewhere around 150 amps wouldn’t have tripped until the motor was pulling over 4,000 amps. I could tell right away why the Auxiliary Operator found that motor burning up without tripping. The protective relays were stuck.
As it turned out… almost all of the 125 or so relays were in the same condition. We cleaned them all up and made them operational.
There is an overcurrent relay for the main bus on each section of a main switchgear.
A picture of a clean switchgear. Picture 6 rows of switchgear like this
When I tested the “As Found” instantaneous trip for the main bus relay, I found that it was so high that the Unit 6 Main Turbine Generator would have melted down before the protective relay would have tripped the power to that one section of switchgear. The entire electric bus would have been nothing but molten metal by that time.
As I tested each of these relays, I kept shaking my head in disbelief. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The mystery as to why these relays were all glued shut by varnish was finally solved, and that reason was even more unbelievable.
Here is what I found….. The first thing you do when you are going to test a relay is that you fill out a form that includes all the relay information, such as, what it is for, what are the settings on the relay, and what are the levels of tests that you are going to perform on it. You also include a range of milliseconds that are acceptable for the relay for each of the tests. Normally, you just copy what was used in the previous test, because you need to include the time it took for the Previous “As Left” test on your form. That is why we needed the forms from the previous test.
So, I had copied the information from the previous test form and began testing the relay (one of the first overcurrent relays we tested)… Again… I was a 34 year old teacher trying to impress my 63 year old student. So, I was showing him how you mechanically adjust the relay in order for it to trip within the acceptable range. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t adjust the relay so that it would even be close to the desired range for the longer time trip times…. like the 2 second to 25 second range. It wasn’t even close to the range that was on the form from the last test.
The form from the last test showed that the relay was in the right range for all the levels of test. When I tested it, like I said, it wasn’t even close. So, I went to the diagram in the instruction manual for this type of relay. The diagram looks similar to this one used for thermal overloads:
Thermal Overload Tripping curves
See all those red lines? Well, when you setup a relay, you have a dial where you set the range depending on the needs for the type of motor you are trying to trip. Each red line represents each setting on the dial. Most of the relays were set on the same number, so we would be using the same red line on the diagram to figure out at different currents how long it should take for a relay to trip….
Here is the clincher….The time range that was written on the previous form wasn’t for the correct relay setting. The person that tested the relay had accidentally looked at the wrong red line. — That in itself is understandable, since it could be easy to get on the wrong line… The only thing is that as soon as you test the relay, you would know that something is wrong, because the relay wouldn’t trip in that range, just like I had found.
I double and triple checked everything to make sure we were looking at the same thing. The previous form indicated the same settings on the relay as now, yet, the time ranges were for a different line! — Ok. I know. I have bored you to tears with all this stuff about time curves and overcurrent trips… so I will just tell you what this means…
This meant that when the person completed the forms the last time, they didn’t test the relays at all. They just filled out the paperwork. They put in random values that were in the acceptable range and sat around in the air conditioned lab during the entire overhaul smoking his pipe. — Actually, I don’t remember if he smoked a pipe or not. He was the Electrical Specialist for the plant. I remembered seeing him sitting in the lab with a relay hooked up to the test set throughout the entire overhaul when I had been there during previous overhauls, but I realized finally that he never tested the relays. He didn’t even go so far as try to operate them.
I went back through the records to when the plant was first “checked out”. Doyle Fullen had done the check out on the relays and the test after that. Doyle had written the correct values from the manual on his forms. I could see where he had actually performed the tests on the relays and was getting the same values I was finding when I tested the relays, so I was certain that I wasn’t overlooking anything.
As I tested each of the relays, I kept shaking my head in disbelief. It was so unbelievable. How could someone do such a thing? Someone could have been killed because a protective relay wasn’t working correctly. This was serious stuff.
One day while Charles and I were working away on the relays, Jack Coffman, the Superintendent of all the Power Plants came walking through the lab. He asked us how we were doing. I swiveled around in my chair to face him and I said, “Pretty good, except for this pain in my neck” as I rubbed the back of my neck.
Jack stopped and asked me what happened. I told him that I had been shaking my head in disbelief for the last two weeks, and it gave me a pain in the neck. Of course, I knew this would get his attention, so he asked, “Why?” I went through all the details of what I had found.
I showed him how since the time that Doyle Fullen last tested the relays more than 10 years earlier, these relays hadn’t been tested at all. I showed him how the main bus relays were so bad that it would take over 100,000 amps to have tripped the 7100 KV switchgear bus or 710 Megawatts! More power than the entire generator could generate. It was only rated at about 550 Megawatts at the most.
Jack stood there looking off into space for a few seconds, and then walked out the door…. I thought I saw him shaking his head as he left. Maybe he was just looking both ways for safety reasons, but to me, it looked like a shake of disbelief. I wonder if I had given him the same pain in the neck.
That is really the end of the relay story, but I do want to say a few words about Charles Lay. He was a hard working electrician that was nearing retirement. People would come around to hear us discussing religion. I am Catholic, and he went to a Fundamental Christian Church. We would debate the differences between our beliefs and just Christian beliefs in general. We respected each other during our time together, even though he was sure I am going to hell when I die.
People would come in just to hear our discussion for a while as we were cleaning and calibrating the relays. One day Charles asked me if I could help him figure out how much he was going to receive from his retirement from the electric company. He had only been working there for three years. Retirement at that time was determined by your years of service. So, three years didn’t give him too much.
When I calculated his amount, he was upset. He said, “Am I going to have to work until I die?” I said, “Well, there’s always your 401k and Social Security.” He replied that he can’t live on Social Security. I said, “Well, there’s your 401k.” He asked, “What’s that?” (oh. not a good sign).
I explained that it was a retirement plan where you are able to put money in taxed deferred until you take it out when you retire. He said, “Oh. I never put anything in something like that.” My heart just sank as I looked in his eyes. He had suddenly realized that he wasn’t going to receive a retirement like those around him who had spent 35 years working in the Power Plant.
When I left the plant after teaching Charles Lay how to test the relays, that was the last time I ever saw him. I don’t know what became of Charles. I figure he would be 83 years old today. I wonder if he finally retired when he reached the 80 points for your age and years of service. He would have never reached enough years of service to receive a decent amount of retirement from the Electric Company since he didn’t start working there until he was 60 years old. That is, unless he’s still working there now.
As I said earlier in this post, Charles Lay was a very good worker. He always struck me as the “Hardworking type”. I often think about the time we spent together, especially when I hear about a power blackout somewhere. — A word of caution to Power Companies…. keep your protective relays in proper working condition. Don’t slack off on the Preventative Maintenance. — I guess that’s true for all of us… isn’t it? Don’t slack off on Preventative Maintenance in all aspects of your life.
Added note: On 7/6/2019, 3 weeks after re-posting this story, look what happened: Con Edison says cause of NYC blackout was substation’s faulty relay protection system
Power Plant Men Learn how Money Matters
Many years ago in my earlier days as a Power Plant Electrician while working on Relays at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, Ben Davis, a plant electrician and True Power Man introduced me to one of his favorite Rock and Roll Bands, the “Dire Straits”. One of their hit songs is “Money For Nothing.” About 14 years later, the Power Plant Men learned exactly how to make “Money For Nothing” and other “Money Matters”!
Albert Einstein was once asked what the greatest miracle known to man is, and he replied “Compound Interest”.
Albert Einstein
One day at the Power Plant our timekeeper Linda Shiever invited a Financial Planner to come to the plant and talk to the Power Plant Men about the importance of planning ahead for your retirement. This may have been the first time many of the Power Plant Men had ever heard of such a thing as “Compound Interest”.
Linda Shiever
To a Power Plant Man, “Compound Interest” sounds more like “paying close attention when you pound something with a sledge hammer”.
The Financial Planner explained to the Power Plant Men that it is important to begin planning for the future early in your life. He gave us a sheet of paper titled “Put the Magic of compounding to work for you.” It showed how someone 25 years old investing in the stock market (S&P 500 which averages 10% annually over time) by putting $2,000 in something that gives you a 10% return for 8 years, and then stops, while another person waits 8 years until they are 33 and spends the rest of their life putting $2,000 into the same stock market they will never have as much as the person who only put in $2000 for 8 years beginning when they were 25 years old.
Let me explain this a little more: Using compound interest at 10% rate for his example (since that is what you receive in the S&P 500 over time), he showed that the person that invested $16,000 beginning at 25 years old and adding $2000 each year for only 8 years will have a net earnings of over $1,000,000 by the time they are 71 years old. Yet the person that waited 8 years and invested $78,000 by adding $2,000 each year until they are 71 will only have a net earnings of $800,000. The importance was that compound interest works best when you start early.
This is a great lesson to learn. The problem was that the majority of the audience was already well over 40 years old. There may have been one person in the room that was 25 years old, and that was only because they weren’t telling the truth about their age.
On Friday, September 6, 1996 a group of us from the plant were told to show up at a hotel conference room not far from corporate headquarters to attend a meeting that was called “Money Matters”. The other phrase they used to describe the meeting was that it was a “Root Learning” class. The reason it was called Root Learning was because the company that put the class together for the Electric Company was called Root Learning.
When we arrived, we were told which table we were going to sit. Bruce Scambler was the leader of the table where I was appointed to sit. When we were assigned seats, it was in a way that the Power Plant Men were spread out across the tables, so that we were each sitting with people from other departments in the company. I supposed right away that this was so that we could maximize the spread of the Power Plant culture to others.
This turned out to be a class about how the company has problems that need to be resolved. When the class began the leader placed a poster in the middle of the table. It showed a picture of a canyon. The workers were on one side and the leaders were on the other with the managers stuck in the middle. It was very similar to this picture:
The Canyon Root Learning Map
This was an ingenious representation of the problems the company had with the management structure. The poster we had was customized for our particular company.
We talked for a couple of hours about how we could bridge the gap between management and the workers. What were some of the barriers in the tornado that kept destroying those bridges…. etc.
The following year on September 24, 1997, we attended another meeting in Enid Oklahoma where we learned about Shareholder value. The leader of my table this year was a young man from HR at Corporate Headquarters (I’ll mention this guy in a later post). This topic made more sense as it really did talk about Money this time. This time the maps they showed us had race cars on it which showed the different competing electric companies. Something like this:
The Shareholder learning map
Being the main electric company in the state, our truck was on the Regulated track. Some of the electric providers had figured out a way to go the unregulated route. Our company kept looking for ways to get on the unregulated road by offering other services that were not regulated. After looking at the poster that looked similar to the one above for a while and talking about it, we moved on to the next poster:
The second Shareholder Map
Even though the chart is the main part of this picture, most of the discussion took place around the “Expense Street” section in the picture. There was an added pie chart that was on a card that was placed on this street which showed how the expenses of the company were broken down.
The main expense for the company was Fuel. I want to say that it was close to 40% of expenses. Taxes was the next largest expense for the company. It made up somewhere around 30% of our total expenses. The rest of the expenses were the other costs to run the company. Employee wages made up around 8% of the total expenses for the company.
Employee wages was the smallest piece of the pie
It was the job of the leader at the table to explain that the cost for fuel was pretty well fixed, so we can’t do anything about that. We also can’t do anything about how much taxes the company pays. We didn’t have control over the supplies and other costs the company buys. So, the bottom line was that the little sliver of expenses for the company that represented “Employee Wages” was really the only thing we can adjust to increase shareholder value…..
What? Run that one by me again? We were a 3 billion dollar revenue company. We had around 3,000 employees which we had reduced to around 2,000 employees when the Corporation Commission cut how much we could charge for electricity, and now you’re saying that the only way to keep the company afloat is to “adjust” employee wages because 92% of everything else it “out-of-bounds”? I think you can see why we spent a lot of time discussing this… This turned into a pretty lively discussion.
Learning about the “Time Value of Money” can be very helpful. I had a financial calculator that I kept at the plant. One day one of the Power Plant Men came to me and asked me to figure out how they could buy a Harley Davidson Motorcycle. Earl Frazier said that he could only afford something like $230 per month and the wanted to buy this motorcycle. How would he do that? The motorcycle cost something like $38,000 or more. I don’t remember the exact details.
A Harley Davidson Motorcycle
Sounds complicated doesn’t it? How does a Power Plant Man buy a Harley Davidson for only $230.00 per month with only a four year loan? Earl had heard that I knew all about the “Time Value of Money” and that if there was a way, I would be able to tell him how to do it. His parameters were that the cost of the motorcycle was $38,000 (I’m just guessing as I don’t remember the exact amounts), and he could only pay $230 each month.
Well. Even with a no interest loan, it would take over 13 years to pay for the motorcycle. So, my only option for solving this problem was to pull out my financial calculator:
My Texas Instrument BAII Plus Financial Calculator
This calculator allowed me to find the monthly payment quickly for a loan at a specific interest rate over a specific number of months. So, I worked backward from that point. I told Earl to come back in a couple of hours and I would let him know his options.
Earl Frazier
When Earl returned, I had his answer…. I told him this…. Each month he needed to begin putting his $230.00 into an annual CD at the bank for 5% (yeah… they had those at that time). In two and a half years, he would stop doing that. And just put his money in his regular checking account. Then 9 months later, he takes the money in his checking account and buys the Harley Davidson. This way he would put 10% down up front (because CDs would have been rolling into his account also).
Then, each month, as his CDs became available, he would roll part of them back into another year, leaving out a certain amount each time to supplement the $230.00 he would still be paying each month for his motorcycle, since his payments would be significantly higher than that. Then exactly after 4 years, he would have used up all of the money in his account just as he would be paying off his motorcycle. This would only work if he could get a loan for the motorcycle that charged 3.7% interest rate or less which was a reasonable rate at the time.
Earl responded by saying, “You mean I will have to wait 3 years before I can buy the motorcycle?!?!” Yeah. That was the bottom line… and by the end of it all, he would have to pay for the motorcycle over a 7 year period when it came down to it. He wasn’t too happy about having to wait, but that was the only way he could do it for $230 monthly payments.
Here is a side story… A few years later when I went to work for Dell, we also had Root Learning classes there as well. Here is one of the posters we used during the class:
In this picture, Dell is the big boat at the top. When I walked into the class I recognized the style of the poster right off the bat. Oh! Root Learning! This will be fun. These types of classes were a fun way to express the realities of the business and the obstacles they have to overcome to achieve their goals.
I still remember the leader at our table 13 years later. His name is Jonah Vaught. I worked with him about 5 years after that class. I acted like I knew him, and I could tell that he was wondering where we had met. So, I finally told him…. “You were the group leader when we were doing that Money Matters class back in 2002.”
End of Side story….
Now when I listen to the Dire Straits’ song “Money For Nothing” (like Paul Harvey’s “Rest of the Story”) you know what goes through my mind… First sitting in the switchgear working on relays with Ben Davis listening to Rock and Roll on the radio (see the post: “Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis“).
Secondly, I remember the Power Plant Men learning the “Time Value of Money” in a fun way that kept them interested.
Thirdly, I remember Charles Lay finally realizing when he was 63 years old that he was going to have to work the rest of his life because he hadn’t been saving for retirement…. See the post “Pain in the Neck Muskogee Power Plant Relay Testing“). Some times when you learn about the Time Value of Money…. it’s too late to do anything about it because time has already run out.
Telling Time Power Plant Man Style
Originally posted November 1, 2013:
You would think that telling time is a pretty universal past time. I used to think that myself. That is, until I went to work at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma when I first went to work there in 1979 as a summer help. I noticed something was different when I walked into the office to meet the Assistant Plant Manager, Bill Moler and the clock on his wall looked kind of funny. I had to stare at it for a moment before I realized what it meant:
24 hour clock
The Power Plant Men called it Military Time because many of them had been in the military during the Vietnam War and had learned to tell time using this type of clock. When we filled out our timecards at the end of the day we put 0800 to 1600 Well. I put in the colons like this: 8:00 to 16:00 but that wasn’t the real Power Plant Man way to do it.
That wasn’t the only thing I learned about Power Plant Man time. Power Plant Men keep time in other ways. One of those ways, though it involves a clock, the time being observed isn’t the time of day. Instead it centers around five events.
Startin’ Time, Morning Break, Lunch Time and Afternoon Break and Quitin’ Time. A Power Plant Man’s day revolves around these events.
The moment Startin’ Time begins, the Power Plant Men are looking forward to Morning Break. They schedule their efforts around this event. That is, if they need to do a certain job that would run them into Morning Break, then they figure out something else to do, and push that event out until Morning Break is over.
In General, Morning Break would begin at 9:30 (Oh. I mean 0930 — pronounced “Oh Nine Thirty”). It was supposed to be 15 minutes long, but in order to make sure you didn’t miss your break, you usually headed toward the shop 15 minutes early. Then by the time you headed back out the door to and returned to your work, another 10 to 15 minutes went by. Essentially stretching morning break from 15 minutes to 40 to 45 minutes.
This was especially true in the early days of the Power Plant. The Power Plant Men’s culture evolved over time so that the actual time spent on their 15 minute break probably shortened from 45 minutes to 30 minutes.
The idea that the employees weren’t spending every moment of their day when not on break working just confounded Plant Managers, such as the “Evil Plant Manager” that I often talk about. Our first plant manager was so tight, when he worked at a gas plant in Oklahoma City, he was known for taking rags out of the trash and putting them back in the rag box because they weren’t dirty enough.
Now that I work at Dell as a Business Systems Analyst (and since I first wrote this post, I have changed jobs and now work for General Motors) after many years of working for great managers and not-so-great managers, I am always relieved when I find that a new manager doesn’t measure you by how many hours you are sitting at the computer, but by your results.
For those that looked closely at the performance of the Power Plant Men at our particular plant, they would find that when a job needed to be done, it would be done… on time. The bottom line was that when you treat the employees with respect, they go the extra mile for you.
“Quitin’ Time” was always an interesting time. From the first day that I arrived as a summer help (1979) until the day I left 22 years later (2001), Even though “Quitin’ Time” was at 4:30 (or 1630, later changing to 1730), it really began at 4:00 (or 1600, pronounced “sixteen hundred”).
at 4:00, a half hour before it was time to go out to the parking lot and drive home, everyone would return to the shop, where they would spend the next 30 minutes cleaning up and filling out their daily timecard. The timecard was, and probably still is, a sheet of paper.
A Daily timecard similar to this
Amazing huh? You would think with the way things are that paper timecards would have disappeared a long time ago. I could be wrong about that. If it is any different at the plant today, I’ll encourage one of them to leave a comment below updating me.
There are other ways that Power Plant Men tell time. Sure, they know that there are seasons, like Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. But it is more likely that in their minds the Power Plant Men are thinking more like this…. Instead of Summer, they would think that this is “Peak Load”. That is, the units need to stay operational because the citizens of this country are in dire need of air conditioning.
Instead of Fall, there are two thoughts running through a Power Plant Man’s mind…. Hunting Season and the start of “Overhauls”.
As hunting season nears, many Power Plant Men are staking out their territories and setting up their deer stands. Some are out practicing with their bows as Bow Season starts first before you can use a rifle. The Plant staff didn’t like their employees taking off Christmas vacation, and did everything they could to keep you in town during the holiday. But when it came down to it… The real time to worry was during hunting season.
An Overhaul is when you take one of the units offline to work on things that you can’t work on when it is running. the main area being inside the boiler. When overhauls come around, it is a chance for working a lot of overtime. The pay is good especially if you get to go to another plant to work because then you not only get to work 10 or 12 hour days, but you receive a Per Diem of somewhere from $28.50 to $35.00 each day depending on how far back you want to look.
I don’t know what the Per Diem is today. I’m sure it must be much higher. Plus you get driving time back and forth each week, and you also receive mileage! So, you can see why Power Plant Men were often very anxious to go away on overhaul.
Overhaul season ran from the Fall into the Spring. It is during that time when the electric company could take a couple of units offline at a time because the electric demand wasn’t so high.
Another season that many Power Plant Men counted on was “Fishing Season”. It wasn’t like the other seasons, because it kind of ran into a lot of the others. If the weather was right, and the rain was right and the Missus was all right with it… Then it was fishing season. There were different types of fishing. In the electric shop, “Noodling” was popular. That is when you reach under the rocks in a river and feel around for a fish and then end up catching it with your bare hands.
Here is a picture I found on Google Images of someone that noodled an over-sized catfish
Another timekeeping tool used by Power Plant men was “Pay Day”. It came around every two weeks. After a while everyone was on direct deposit, so it wasn’t like they were all waiting around for someone to actually hand them a paycheck. Many did plan their trips to the mall or to the gun shows in Oklahoma City around Pay Day. It was common to live from paycheck to paycheck.
If you worked in the coalyard, then you calibrated your clock by when the next coal train was going to roll into the dumper. There was generally a steady stream of coal trains coming and going. When a coal train was late, or even early, then I think it seemed to throw some coalyard hands into a state of confusion. But, then again, now that I think about it…. Walt Oswalt usually did seem to be in a state of confusion. — I’m just joking of course….. Well… you know…
If you were a Control Room Operator, then you were in a sort of Twilight Zone, because there really was only one small window in the entire Control room and that was only so that you could look through a small telescope at the Main Power Substation in case…. well… in case you were bored and you needed to be reassured that the world still did exist out there.
In the control room, there were clocks, but the control room operators had a lot more pretty lights to look at back then. Here is my favorite picture of a Power Plant Control Room (not the one where I worked):
I love this picture!
See all those lights? Now everything is on the computer. That way if some foreign terrorist group decides they want to shut down the electric grid, all they have to do is hack into the system and down it goes. They couldn’t do that when the control room looked like this.
It seemed that being in the control room was out of time. It didn’t matter what time of the day you went in the control room. In the morning, the afternoon, even at two in morning. It always seemed the same. There were always two control room operators sitting or standing at their posts. The Shift Supervisor was sitting in his office, or was standing somewhere nearby. Other operators were walking in and out going on their rounds. I think the Control Room operators only knew that it was time to go home because the next shift would show up to take their place.
Electricians on the other hand, had their own kind of timekeeping. Well, not all of them… ok…. well… maybe just me…. I used an oscilloscope a lot when I was working on the precipitator controls, and so very small amounts of time meant a lot to me. For instance… The regular 60 cycle electricity in your house goes from zero to about 134 volts and then back to zero about every 8 and 1/3 thousands of a second (or .00833333…).
I used an Analog oscilloscope like this until we were given a new Digital one where you could zoom in and do all sorts of neat things.
I will talk about it later, but when you are testing tripping relays, even as little as one thousandth of a second can be important. So, telling time with an oscilloscope can vary widely.
Then there were those timekeeping Power Plant Men that kept time by how long it was going to be to retirement. It was more of a countdown. I remember one Power Plant Man saying that he only had 21 more years and then he was outta there. An even more sad story was when Charles Lay at Muskogee who was 63 asked me to figure out his retirement because he wanted to retire in 2 years. Well….. sad to say… He had only been working there for 3 or so years, so his retirement package wasn’t going to be much and had never put anything into a 401k or an IRA.
Those who spent their lives working at the plant were able to retire with great benefits. It wasn’t like a union with all the healthcare and stuff, but the company did offer a very good retirement plan for those that had been there for the long haul. I suppose at this point they are measuring time in terms of their lifetime.
What it boils down to is that some Power Plant Men measured their life one-day-at-a-time, while others just looked at the entire time of their life as one time. Some looked forward to a time when they would be able to rest, while others enjoyed their work each day.
When I think about time, I realize that an infinite number of things can take place each second. Yet, a lifetime can go by without ever grasping what is important and what is fleeting. When I think back at the time that I spent working at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, what I feel is that I was blessed by the presence of such great men and women and it was time well spent.
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Time ran backwards on one clock at the Seminole Plant. Bob Henley (Seminole Plant Electrical Supervisor) rewired his office clock motor to run in reverse! You had to mentally reverse the clock face to read the time. If you noticed the smallest “hand” tracking seconds was moving counter-clockwise, that gave you a clue. Bob was a unique Power Plant Man.
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If you will remember we were working with guys from the Korean, Vietnam & WW2 back then. As for the time cards, what a mess, some like me do direct entry into SAP and some put it on a spreadsheet that the timekeeper can cut & paste. Yes, there are some that still do timecards every day!!!! I would like to relate a little more but it is almost lunch time!! Maybe after my final break I can pass on more info. Later
Comments from the last repost
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I sometimes feel like a fly on the wall…a fly spy, if you will. LOL
I worked in Tulsa for a vendor-on-site at the A/A Computer Center. Got quickly indoctrinated with Military time. To this day I still enjoy using it. Go figure…must be the Military brat in me. 😉
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The planet I work in still uses Military time for everything. They longer use time cards as everything is computerized, but the whole plant still looks at time the same way. Thankfully, we have outside break rooms. And you still have people that go out just to check that the world is still moving. It blows me away how much of life in a factory/plant revolves around this type of time that’s described. It’s truly like you say it is. At least of your little plant.
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From Pioneers to Power Plant Managers
Originally posted December 28, 2013:
Times were changing in 1987 when the electric company in Oklahoma decided that they needed to downsize the company in order to change with the new business environment. I always seemed to think that the executives down at corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City knew that the old pioneers in charge of the Power Plants would be very difficult customers when it came to the new business model.
Like I said…. Times were changing. The digital era was being introduced to the power industry. We had already upgraded the precipitator controls to make them computerized. Other areas of the plant were going to be next. Especially the employees. Of course, none of us knew that quite yet, except Bill Rivers, who was a natural visionary, and he was gone.
Side story time:
I had always been interested in computers and programming from the time I was a sophomore in High School when I had just turned 15 years old. My friend Jesse Cheng had introduced me to one of the first programmable calculators, the HP-25.
The HP-25 calculator
This was the most wonderful Christmas present I had ever received. I literally felt myself fainting when I opened the present and found that I had been given a pair of cowboy boots, only to find an HP-25 calculator inside when I opened it up. Ralphie had nothing on me that day.
It was much like the Christmas Story with Ralphie. I had tried every with way to convince my parents that using a slide rule in High School was passe (pronounced “pass A”). All the other students in my advanced chemistry class were using calculators, and I was still stuck with my dad’s old circular slide rule. It was a pretty neat one, I’ll grant you that, but it just… well….. I could work things out on paper faster than I could use the slide rule.
The Gilson Atlas circular slide rule I used in High School
I introduced my friend Jesse Cheng in the post “Why Do Power Plant Men Always Lose the Things They Love Most“. He had an HP-25 calculator and had loaned it to me to take a Chemistry test. He showed me how it used Reverse Polish Notation, which is different than a normal calculator, but more like a computer.
The calculator could be programmed with 49 steps. Because it had a stack built right into it, and the reason it used Reversed Polish Notation, we could create all sorts of games with just those 49 steps. The book that came with the calculator had a moon landing game. We made more sophisticated games, like one called Battleship.
Anyway. Because of this early exposure with actually programming something in a logical manner, I was eager to learn more about programming. During college, my calculator was often sitting on my desk in the dorm room running a long program to help me perfect a random number generator. Finally in my Junior year in college, my calculator was completely fried.
After I was married at the end of 1985, I began subscribing to a magazine called “Compute”. It had actual programs in it in Basic. I would read the programs to learn how it worked, but at that point, I didn’t own a computer, so all I could do was dream about writing programs.
It wasn’t until Thanksgiving 1987 when I went to visit my ol’ friend Jesse Cheng in Columbia, Missouri who was interning as a medical doctor that I felt a sudden need to have a computer of my own. He had built a computer using a Heath Kit and we used it to play two computer games. One was called Starflight:
Starflight by Electronic Arts
The other was called F15 Strike Eagle:
F-15 Strike Eagle by Microprose
When I returned home I was pretty eager to buy a computer. Up until that time, every time my wife and I had gone to the mall, I always had stopped in the computer stores to look at the latest computers. I never had really considered buying one. But now, they had 20 megabyte hard drives! And you could play these terrific games like Starflight and F-15 Strike Eagle.
So, one day after we had left the mall, and my wife could see the look on my face, she finally said…. “Why don’t you go and buy one?” I asked her, “Are you sure? Because you know what is going to happen if I get a computer. I’ll be playing on it all the time.” She said, “No. I want you to go buy one.” So we turned around and went back to the mall.
That was the start of my journey into the world of computers.
End of Side Story.
As I explained in the post “Boppin’ with Bif during the Power Plant Downsizing“, the company offered an early retirement package for everyone 55 years old and older. They would give them full benefits to leave. This meant that our Electrical Supervisor, Leroy Godfrey, as well as the assistant plant manager, Bill Moler and the Plant Manager, Eldon Waugh were all going to retire some time in August 1987.
We had a retirement party for Leroy Godfrey out in the country at Diana Brien’s house. A bunch of the electricians were there including Mark Meeks, who Leroy knew at the time was the one that was going to be laid off. Mark commented about that later when he was told that he was losing his job that Leroy had sat there and smiled at him while we were at the party. Mark knew Leroy didn’t like him, but hadn’t expected to be the one to go since everyone thought it would be Gary Wehunt, since he was the newest member in the shop.
I explained in the post, “The Passing of an Old School Power Plant Man — Leroy Godfrey” what Leroy’s management style was like. It was very top-down, if you know what I mean. It was like, “Because I told you so.” No need to explain anything. That was the world of Power Plant Management up to that point.
I think Corporate Headquarters realized that this needed to change in order for the company to compete in a world where electric companies could no longer count on the Corporation Commission to guarantee a sustainable electric rate or even a set number of customers. The world of electric power was changing rapidly and the company needed to move on from the mentality that it could be run like a “good ol’ boys” club.
It is easier to teach young dogs new tricks than older and crankier ones. It looked to me like this was a logical choice when looking back using hindsight. I think the company was making a bold move. I don’t think they really had much of a choice if they wanted to survive.
So, we had the main retirement party at the plant where people stood up and told stories about the old guys that were retiring. Nothing much happened there except the part where Leroy Godfrey’s daughter stood up and said that we just had to work with him, while she had to live with him… see the post about Leroy above for the full story about that.
Then the following Monday. I believe it was August 17, 1987, everyone was told to meet in the main break room for a meeting with our new management. That was when we were introduced to our new plant manager, Ron Kilman.
I remember a certain part of the meeting very well. Ron said something funny. It didn’t matter exactly what he said. I don’t even remember what it was. Probably something self-deprecating. I leaned over to Charles Foster, who had been my foreman for a while (on that day, it was officially Andy Tubbs). I said, “I didn’t know Plant Managers could tell jokes!”
Charles looked back at me and I raised my eyebrows and tilted my head while the corners of my mouth went down. — This was one of the signals I had learned while carpooling with Bud Schoonover when I needed to communicate with Dick Dale without saying anything out loud (see the post: Carpooling with Bud Schoonover“. This particular expression meant, “Maybe this won’t be such a bad thing.”
Ron Kilman remained the plant manager at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma for the next 7 years. The stories that I will post during this next year will all be at least partially from this time period. During this time, there were some decisions that Ron made that I applauded, and others that even he would admit he wished he hadn’t made.
All in all, I think that Ron has a good heart and that those times when he did make a rash decision, it was evident that he was falling back to his “management training” and not managing from his heart. Old School management training left a lot to be desired.
During the 7 years from 1987 to 1994, the power plant saw a lot of changes. Some I have alluded to already. Such as the move to computerize everything. The other was a total change in how management works. Or at least that was the attempt.
People were willing to step out of their regular day-to-day jobs and try new things that they thought would help the plant. Many of these things were successful. Some of them failed, but not so miserably as they would have if the earlier management had been around. The employees felt as if they had more of a say in how the plant ran instead of feeling like they were just a bunch of tools running around fixing things.
I have a quote from Ron Kilman that said it all one day after a catastrophe had occurred. It summed up his management style as opposed to his assistant manager, Ben Brandt. I will relay the exact story later, but for now I’ll just say that when Ben Brandt saw what happened, the first thing that he said was, “Who did this?” When Ron Kilman saw what had happened, the first thing he said was, “How can we prevent this from happening again?”
Ben’s approach was from the old school of thought. Blame and punish the culprit. Later when we were drastically changing the way process improvements took place, my favorite quote from Ben Brandt is, “I am the obstacle! We aren’t going to change because I say so.” We all had to agree. He was definitely the obstacle.
Ron’s approach was one more like a leader. “Let’s get the job done right.” Sure, he is human, so the decisions weren’t always perfect, but I think in general, he was leading where other people may have been dragging.
Well… I will say no more for now… I look forward to writing stories about this time period during this next year. I’m sure there are a lot of those at the plant just as eager to see how I portray the different events that took place during this time.
Comments from the original post:
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HP 25? The only model older is Fred Flintstone’s bird chiseling into rock tablet!
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One day, a fellow operator and I brought in our old slide rules, just to show. Not the round one like yours, but straight and mine had a leather case. A young engineer came hurrying through the control room and said, “I need a calculator – QUICK!” so I handed him my leather case & he ran out, about 30 seconds later he came back with a puzzled look on his face & said “No, I don’t need to MEASURE something, I need to CALCULATE something” We all had a hearty laugh!
Comments from the last repost:
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I loved the old Heath Kits. I built a 14 watt amplifier and an AM/FM receiver that I used for years (both were the tube type – pre-transistor). It was always satisfying to invest a few hours, save a few dollars, learn some new skills, and enjoy a product you couldn’t buy at a store.
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I still have my 25. It still works.
Pain in the Neck Muskogee Power Plant Relay Testing
Don’t let the title fool you. I love testing Power Plant Protective Relays. There is a sense of satisfaction when you have successfully cleaned, calibrated and tested a relay that is going to protect the equipment you have to work on every day. With that said, I was hit with such an unbelievable situation when testing Muskogee Relays in 1995 that I was left with a serious pain in the neck.
On August 14, 2003 the electric power in the Northeast United States and Canada went out. The Blackout lasted long enough to be a major annoyance for those in the that region of the United States.
Map of the power blackout in 2003
When I heard about how the blackout had moved across the region, I immediately knew what had happened. I was quickly reminded of the following story. I told my wife Kelly, “I know exactly why such a large area lost power! They hadn’t done proper preventative maintenance on the Protective Relays in the substations! Just like….” Well…. I’ll tell you that part now:
I have mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that something always seemed a little “off” at the Muskogee Power Plant. I had decided early on that while working there I would stick to drinking sodas instead of water. See the post: “Something’s In the Water at the Muskogee Power Plant“. Even with that knowledge, I was still shocked at what I found while testing relays at the plant.
This story really begins one Sunday at Muskogee when one of the Auxiliary Operators was making his rounds inspecting equipment. He was driving his truck around the south edge of the Unit 6 parking lot on the service road. He glanced over at a pump next to the road, and at first, he thought he was just seeing things. After stopping the truck and backing up for a second glance, he was sure he wasn’t dreaming. It’s just that what he was seeing seemed so strange, he wasn’t sure what was happening.
The operator could see what appeared to be silver paint chips popping off of the large pump motor in all directions. After closer examination, he figured out that the motor was burning up. It was still running, but it had become so hot that the paint was literally burning off of the motor.
Like this Horizontal pump only much bigger and painted silver
A motor like this would get hot if the bearings shell out. Before the motor is destroyed, the protective relays on the breaker in the 4,000 Volt switchgear shuts the motor off. In this case, the relay hadn’t tripped the motor, so, it had become extremely hot and could have eventually exploded if left running. The operator shut the motor down and wrote a work order for the electricians.
Doyle Fullen was the foreman in the electric shop that received the work order. When he looked into what had happened, he realized that the protective relay had not been inspected for a couple of years for this motor.
I couldn’t find a picture of Doyle. In his youth he reminds me of a very smart Daryl in Walking Dead:
Norman Reedus from Walking Dead
In fact, since before the downsizing in 1994, none of the Protective Relays at the plant had been inspected. The person that had been inspecting the relays for many years had moved to another job or retired in 1994. This was just a warning shot across the bow that could have had major consequences.
No one at Muskogee had been trained to test Protective Relays since the downsizing, so they reached out to our plant in North Central Oklahoma for help. That was when I was told that I was going to be going to Muskogee during the next overhaul (outage). I had been formally trained to inspect, clean, calibrate and test Protective Relays with two of my Power Plant Heroes, Ben Davis and Sonny Kendrick years earlier. See the post: “Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis“.
My Protective Relay Maintenance course book
Without going into too much detail about the actual tests we performed as I don’t want to make this a long rambling post (like… well…. like most of my posts…..I can already tell this is going to be a long one), I will just say that I took our antiquated relay tester down to Muskogee to inspect their relays and teach another electrician Charles Lay, how to perform those tests in the future. Muskogee had a similar Relay Test Set. These were really outdated, but they did everything we needed, and it helped you understand exactly what was going on when you don’t have a newfangled Relay Test Set.
AVO Multi-Amp SR-76 Relay Test Set
You need to periodically test both mechanical and electronic protective relays. In the electronic relays the components change their properties slightly over time, changing the time it takes to trip a breaker under a given circumstance (we’re talking about milliseconds). In the mechanical relays (which I have always found to be more reliable), they sit inside a black box all the time, heating up and cooling as the equipment is used. Over time, the varnish on the copper coils evaporates and settles on all the components. This becomes sticky so that the relay won’t operate at the point where it should.
A panel of Protective Relays
In the picture above, the black boxes on the top, middle and right are mechanical relays. This means that something actually has to turn or pick up in order to trip the equipment. The electronic relays may have a couple of small relays, but for the most part, they are made up of transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes.
So, with all that said, let me start the real story…. gee…. It’s about time…
So, here I am sitting in the electric shop lab just off of the Unit 6 T-G floor. We set up all the equipment and had taken a couple of OverCurrent relays out of some high voltage breakers in the switchgear. I told Charles that before you actually start testing the relays, you need to have the test documents from the previous test and we also needed the instruction manuals for each of the relays because the manuals will have the diagrams that you use to determine the exact time that the relays should trip for each of the tests. So, we went up to the print room to find the old tests and manuals. Since they weren’t well organized, we just grabbed the entire folder where all the relays tests were kept since Unit 6 had been in operation.
When we began testing the relays at first I thought that the relay test set wasn’t working correctly. Here I was trying to impress my new friend, Charles Lay, a 63 year old highly religious fundamental Christian that I knew what I was doing, and I couldn’t even make a relay trip. I was trying to find the “As Found” tripping level. That is, before you clean up the relay. Just like you found it. Only, it wouldn’t trip.
It turned out that the relay was stuck from the varnish as I explained above. It appeared as if the relay hadn’t been tested or even operated for years. The paperwork showed that it had been tested three years earlier. Protective Relays should be tested at least every two years, but I wouldn’t have thought that the relay would be in such a bad condition in just three years. It had been sitting in a sealed container to keep out dust. But it was what it was.
I told Charles that in order to find the “As Found” point where the relay would trip, we would need to crank up the test set as high as needed to find when it actually did trip. It turned out that the relay which should have instantaneously tripped somewhere around 150 amps wouldn’t have tripped until the motor was pulling over 4,000 amps. I could tell right away why the Auxiliary Operator found that motor burning up without tripping. The protective relays were stuck.
As it turned out… almost all of the 125 or so relays were in the same condition. We cleaned them all up and made them operational.
There is an overcurrent relay for the main bus on each section of a main switchgear.
A picture of a clean switchgear. Picture 6 rows of switchgear like this
When I tested the “As Found” instantaneous trip for the main bus relay, I found that it was so high that the Unit 6 Main Turbine Generator would have melted down before the protective relay would have tripped the power to that one section of switchgear. The entire electric bus would have been nothing but molten metal by that time.
As I tested each of these relays, I kept shaking my head in disbelief. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The mystery as to why these relays were all glued shut by varnish was finally solved, and that reason was even more unbelievable.
Here is what I found….. The first thing you do when you are going to test a relay is that you fill out a form that includes all the relay information, such as, what it is for, what are the settings on the relay, and what are the levels of tests that you are going to perform on it. You also include a range of milliseconds that are acceptable for the relay for each of the tests. Normally, you just copy what was used in the previous test, because you need to include the time it took for the Previous “As Left” test on your form. That is why we needed the forms from the previous test.
So, I had copied the information from the previous test form and began testing the relay (one of the first overcurrent relays we tested)… Again… I was a 34 year old teacher trying to impress my 63 year old student. So, I was showing him how you mechanically adjust the relay in order for it to trip within the acceptable range. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t adjust the relay so that it would even be close to the desired range for the longer time trip times…. like the 2 second to 25 second range. It wasn’t even close to the range that was on the form from the last test.
The form from the last test showed that the relay was in the right range for all the levels of test. When I tested it, like I said, it wasn’t even close. So, I went to the diagram in the instruction manual for this type of relay. The diagram looks similar to this one used for thermal overloads:
Thermal Overload Tripping curves
See all those red lines? Well, when you setup a relay, you have a dial where you set the range depending on the needs for the type of motor you are trying to trip. Each red line represents each setting on the dial. Most of the relays were set on the same number, so we would be using the same red line on the diagram to figure out at different currents how long it should take for a relay to trip….
Here is the clincher….The time range that was written on the previous form wasn’t for the correct relay setting. The person that tested the relay had accidentally looked at the wrong red line. — That in itself is understandable, since it could be easy to get on the wrong line… The only thing is that as soon as you test the relay, you would know that something is wrong, because the relay wouldn’t trip in that range, just like I had found.
I double and triple checked everything to make sure we were looking at the same thing. The previous form indicated the same settings on the relay as now, yet, the time ranges were for a different line! — Ok. I know. I have bored you to tears with all this stuff about time curves and overcurrent trips… so I will just tell you what this means…
This meant that when the person completed the forms the last time, they didn’t test the relays at all. They just filled out the paperwork. They put in random values that were in the acceptable range and sat around in the air conditioned lab during the entire overhaul smoking his pipe. — Actually, I don’t remember if he smoked a pipe or not. He was the Electrical Specialist for the plant. I remembered seeing him sitting in the lab with a relay hooked up to the test set throughout the entire overhaul, but I realized finally that he never tested the relays. He didn’t even go so far as try to operate them.
I went back through the records to when the plant was first “checked out”. Doyle Fullen had done the check out on the relays and the test after that. Doyle had written the correct values from the manual on his forms. I could see where he had actually performed the tests on the relays and was getting the same values I was finding when I tested the relays, so I was certain that I wasn’t overlooking anything.
As I tested each of the relays, I kept shaking my head in disbelief. It was so unbelievable. How could someone do such a thing? Someone could have been killed because a protective relay wasn’t working correctly. This was serious stuff.
One day while Charles and I were working away on the relays, Jack Coffman, the Superintendent of all the Power Plants came walking through the lab. He asked us how we were doing. I swiveled around in my chair to face him and I said, “Pretty good, except for this pain in my neck” as I rubbed the back of my neck.
Jack stopped and asked me what happened. I told him that I had been shaking my head in disbelief for the last two weeks, and it gave me a pain in the neck. Of course, I knew this would get his attention, so he asked, “Why?” I went through all the details of what I had found.
I showed him how since the time that Doyle Fullen last tested the relays more than 10 years earlier, these relays hadn’t been tested at all. I showed him how the main bus relays were so bad that it would take over 100,000 amps to have tripped the 7100 KV switchgear bus or 710 Megawatts! More power than the entire generator could generate. It was only rated at about 550 Megawatts at the most.
Jack stood there looking off into space for a few seconds, and then walked out the door…. I thought I saw him shaking his head as he left. Maybe he was just looking both ways for safety reasons, but to me, it looked like a shake of disbelief. I wonder if I had given him the same pain in the neck.
That is really the end of the relay story, but I do want to say a few words about Charles Lay. He was a hard working electrician that was nearing retirement. People would come around to hear us discussing religion. I am Catholic, and he went to a Fundamental Christian Church. We would debate the differences between our beliefs and just Christian beliefs in general. We respected each other during our time together, even though he was sure I am going to hell when I die.
People would come in just to hear our discussion for a while as we were cleaning and calibrating the relays. One day Charles asked me if I could help him figure out how much he was going to receive from his retirement from the electric company. He had only been working there for three years. Retirement at that time was determined by your years of service. So, three years didn’t give him too much.
When I calculated his amount, he was upset. He said, “Am I going to have to work until I die?” I said, “Well, there’s always your 401k and Social Security.” He replied that he can’t live on Social Security. I said, “Well, there’s your 401k.” He asked, “What’s that?” (oh. not a good sign).
I explained that it was a retirement plan where you are able to put money in taxed deferred until you take it out when you retire. He said, “Oh. I never put anything in something like that.” My heart just sank as I looked in his eyes. He had suddenly realized that he wasn’t going to receive a retirement like those around him who had spent 35 years working in the Power Plant.
When I left the plant after teaching Charles Lay how to test the relays, that was the last time I ever saw him. I don’t know what became of Charles. I figure he would be 83 years old today. I wonder if he finally retired when he reached the 80 points for your age and years of service. He would have never reached enough years of service to receive a decent amount of retirement from the Electric Company since he didn’t start working there until he was 60 years old. That is, unless he’s still working there now.
As I said earlier in this post, Charles Lay was a very good worker. He always struck me as the “Hardworking type”. I often think about the time we spent together, especially when I hear about a power blackout somewhere. — A word of caution to Power Companies…. keep your protective relays in proper working condition. Don’t slack off on the Preventative Maintenance. — I guess that’s true for all of us… isn’t it? Don’t slack off on Preventative Maintenance in all aspects of your life.
Power Plant Men Learn how Money Matters
Many years ago in my earlier days as a Power Plant Electrician while working on Relays at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, Ben Davis, a plant electrician and True Power Man introduced me to one of his favorite Rock and Roll Bands, the “Dire Straits”. One of their hit songs is “Money For Nothing.” About 14 years later, the Power Plant Men learned exactly how to make “Money For Nothing” and other “Money Matters”!
Albert Einstein was once asked what the greatest miracle known to man is, and he replied “Compound Interest”.
Albert Einstein
One day at the Power Plant our timekeeper Linda Shiever invited a Financial Planner to come to the plant and talk to the Power Plant Men about the importance of planning ahead for your retirement. This may have been the first time many of the Power Plant Men had ever heard of such a thing as “Compound Interest”.
Linda Shiever
To a Power Plant Man, “Compound Interest” sounds more like “paying close attention when you pound something with a sledge hammer”.
The Financial Planner explained to the Power Plant Men that it is important to begin planning for the future early in your life. He gave us a sheet of paper titled “Put the Magic of compounding to work for you.” It showed how someone 25 years old investing in the stock market (S&P 500 which averages 10% annually over time) by putting $2,000 in something that gives you a 10% return for 8 years, and then stops, while another person waits 8 years until they are 33 and spends the rest of their life putting $2,000 into the same stock market they will never have as much as the person who only put in $2000 for 8 years beginning when they were 25 years old.
Let me explain this a little more: Using compound interest at 10% rate for his example (since that is what you receive in the S&P 500 over time), he showed that the person that invested $16,000 beginning at 25 years old and adding $2000 each year for only 8 years will have a net earnings of over $1,000,000 by the time they are 71 years old. Yet the person that waited 8 years and invested $78,000 by adding $2,000 each year until they are 71 will only have a net earnings of $800,000. The importance was that compound interest works best when you start early.
This is a great lesson to learn. The problem was that the majority of the audience was already well over 40 years old. There may have been one person in the room that was 25 years old, and that was only because they weren’t telling the truth about their age.
On Friday, September 6, 1996 a group of us from the plant were told to show up at a hotel conference room not far from corporate headquarters to attend a meeting that was called “Money Matters”. The other phrase they used to describe the meeting was that it was a “Root Learning” class. The reason it was called Root Learning was because the company that put the class together for the Electric Company was called Root Learning.
When we arrived, we were told which table we were going to sit. Bruce Scambler was the leader of the table where I was appointed to sit. When we were assigned seats, it was in a way that the Power Plant Men were spread out across the tables, so that we were each sitting with people from other departments in the company. I supposed right away that this was so that we could maximize the spread the Power Plant culture to others.
This turned out to be a class about how the company has problems that need to be resolved. When the class began the leader placed a poster in the middle of the table. It showed a picture of a canyon. The workers were on one side and the leaders were on the other with the managers stuck in the middle. It was very similar to this picture:
The Canyon Root Learning Map
This was an ingenious representation of the problems the company had with the management structure. The poster we had was customized for our particular company.
We talked for a couple of hours about how we could bridge the gap between management and the workers. What were some of the barriers in the tornado that kept destroying those bridges…. etc.
The following year on September 24, 1997, we attended another meeting in Enid Oklahoma where we learned about Shareholder value. The leader of my table this year was a young man from HR at Corporate Headquarters (I’ll mention this guy in a later post). This topic made more sense as it really did talk about Money this time. This time the maps they showed us had race cars on it which showed the different competing electric companies. Something like this:
The Shareholder learning map
Being the main electric company in the state, our truck was on the Regulated track. Some of the electric providers had figured out a way to go the unregulated route. Our company kept looking for ways to get on the unregulated road by offering other services that were not regulated. After looking at the poster that looked similar to the one above for a while and talking about it, we moved on to the next poster:
The second Shareholder Map
Even though the chart is the main part of this picture, most of the discussion took place around the “Expense Street” section in the picture. There was an added pie chart that was on a card that was placed on this street which showed how the expenses of the company were broken down.
The main expense for the company was Fuel. I want to say that it was close to 40% of expenses. Taxes was the next largest expense for the company. It made up somewhere around 30% of our total expenses. The rest of the expenses were the other costs to run the company. Employee wages made up around 8% of the total expenses for the company.
Employee wages was the smallest piece of the pie
It was the job of the leader at the table to explain that the cost for fuel was pretty well fixed, so we can’t do anything about that. We also can’t do anything about how much taxes the company pays. We didn’t have control over the supplies and other costs the company buys. So, the bottom line was that the little sliver of expenses for the company that represented “Employee Wages” was really the only thing we can adjust to increase shareholder value…..
What? Run that one by me again? We were a 3 billion dollar revenue company. We had around 3,000 employees which we had reduced to around 2000 employees when the Corporation Commission cut how much we could charge for electricity, and now you’re saying that the only way to keep the company afloat is to “adjust” employee wages because 92% of everything else it “out-of-bounds”? I think you can see why we spent a lot of time discussing this… This turned into a pretty lively discussion.
Learning about the “Time Value of Money” can be very helpful. I had a financial calculator that I kept at the plant. One day one of the Power Plant Men came to me and asked me to figure out how they could buy a Harley Davidson Motorcycle. Earl Frazier said that he could only afford something like $230 per month and the wanted to buy this motorcycle. How would he do that? The motorcycle cost something like $38,000 or more. I don’t remember the exact details.
A Harley Davidson Motorcycle
Sounds complicated doesn’t it? How does a Power Plant Man buy a Harley Davidson for only $230.00 per month with only a four year loan? Earl had heard that I knew all about the “Time Value of Money” and that if there was a way, I would be able to tell him how to do it. His parameters were that the cost of the motorcycle was $38,000 (I’m just guessing as I don’t remember the exact amounts), and he could only pay $230 each month.
Well. Even with a no interest loan, it would take over 13 years to pay for the motorcycle. So, my only option for solving this problem was to pull out my financial calculator:
My Texas Instrument BAII Plus Financial Calculator
This calculator allowed me to find the monthly payment quickly for a loan at a specific interest rate over a specific number of months. So, I worked backward from that point. I told Earl to come back in a couple of hours and I would let him know his options.
Earl Frazier
When Earl returned, I had his answer…. I told him this…. Each month he needed to begin putting his $230.00 into an annual CD at the bank for 5% (yeah… they had those at that time). In two and a half years, he would stop doing that. And just put his money in his regular checking account. Then 9 months later, he takes the money in his checking account and buys the Harley Davidson. This way he would put 10% down up front (because CDs would have been rolling into his account also).
Then, each month, as his CDs became available, he would roll part of them back into another year, leaving out a certain amount each time to supplement the $230.00 he would still be paying each month for his motorcycle, since his payments would be significantly higher than that. Then exactly after 4 years, he would have used up all of the money in his account just as he would be paying off his motorcycle. This would only work if he could get a loan for the motorcycle that charged 3.7% interest rate or less which was a reasonable rate at the time.
Earl responded by saying, “You mean I will have to wait 3 years before I can buy the motorcycle?!?!” Yeah. That was the bottom line… and by the end of it all, he would have to pay for the motorcycle over a 7 year period when it came down to it. He wasn’t too happy about having to wait, but that was the only way he could do it for $230 monthly payments.
Here is a side story… A few years later when I went to work for Dell, we also had Root Learning classes there as well. Here is one of the posters we used during the class:
In this picture, Dell is the big boat at the top. When I walked into the class I recognized the style of the poster right off the bat. Oh! Root Learning! This will be fun. These types of classes were a fun way to express the realities of the business and the obstacles they have to overcome to achieve their goals.
I still remember the leader at our table 13 years later. His name is Jonah Vaught. I worked with him about 5 years after that class. I acted like I knew him, and I could tell that he was wondering where we had met. So, I finally told him…. “You were the group leader when we were doing that Money Matters class back in 2002.”
End of Side story….
Now when I listen to the Dire Straits’ song “Money For Nothing” (like Paul Harvey’s “Rest of the Story”) you know what goes through my mind… First sitting in the switchgear working on relays with Ben Davis listening to Rock and Roll on the radio (see the post: “Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis“).
Secondly, I remember the Power Plant Men learning the “Time Value of Money” in a fun way that kept them interested.
Thirdly, I remember Charles Lay finally realizing when he was 63 years old that he was going to have to work the rest of his life because he hadn’t been saving for retirement…. See the post “Pain in the Neck Muskogee Power Plant Relay Testing“). Some times when you learn about the Time Value of Money…. it’s too late to do anything about it because time has already run out.
Power Plant Men 
Time ran backwards on one clock at the Seminole Plant. Bob Henley (Seminole Plant Electrical Supervisor) rewired his office clock motor to run in reverse! You had to mentally reverse the clock face to read the time. If you noticed the smallest “hand” tracking seconds was moving counter-clockwise, that gave you a clue. Bob was a unique Power Plant Man.
If you will remember we were working with guys from the Korean, Vietnam & WW2 back then. As for the time cards, what a mess, some like me do direct entry into SAP and some put it on a spreadsheet that the timekeeper can cut & paste. Yes, there are some that still do timecards every day!!!! I would like to relate a little more but it is almost lunch time!! Maybe after my final break I can pass on more info. Later
Comments from the last repost
I sometimes feel like a fly on the wall…a fly spy, if you will. LOL
I worked in Tulsa for a vendor-on-site at the A/A Computer Center. Got quickly indoctrinated with Military time. To this day I still enjoy using it. Go figure…must be the Military brat in me. 😉
The planet I work in still uses Military time for everything. They longer use time cards as everything is computerized, but the whole plant still looks at time the same way. Thankfully, we have outside break rooms. And you still have people that go out just to check that the world is still moving. It blows me away how much of life in a factory/plant revolves around this type of time that’s described. It’s truly like you say it is. At least of your little plant.