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