A New Power Plant Story:

I left my Power Plant family behind 25 years ago to pursue a life of adventure in Round Rock, Texas writing computer applications for Dell for 12 1/2 years and then General Motors for 10 years, after which I retired.  This past summer (2025) I was invited to a Power Plant family reunion that repeats every three months in Stillwater Oklahoma with my past family of the same Power Plant Men that I spent writing about for four years between January 2012 and December 2015.

When I arrived at the lunch being held at the Mexican Restaurant, I met up with 35 men I hadn’t seen for 24 years.  We went around the table introducing ourselves, just in case we couldn’t recognize each other behind the gray hair and wrinkles we were wearing that afternoon.  I sat across the table from an old man I didn’t know, and I introduced myself to him.

I said, ‘Hi, I’m Kevin Breazile.  I used to be an electrician at Sooner.”  He shook his head and said he didn’t remember me.  I knew his voice.  I also recognized the look he gave me.  It was the same sad and confused stare my dad would give me when he wondered who I was while he was struggling with dementia.

He said, “I’m Jasper Christensen.”  I immediately recognized him and realized that his voice was still very similar to the younger Jasper that I knew many years earlier.  He was an Engineering Supervisor and later our Maintenance Supervisor when I left the plant.

I smiled and said, “Jasper!  I’m Kevin!  I was always a troublemaker electrician.  I left in 2001.”  Jasper turned to look at the younger lady sitting next to him, who was obviously there to assist him as he had no memory of me.  I quickly picked up my phone and searched on WordPress for a Power Plant Post that I had re-posted just the weekend before called “Power Plant Quest for the Internet” and showed him the picture I had posted of him:

He was surprised and said, “Oh!  That was a long time ago.”  I said, “Well, you look the same to me.”  He definitely still had the same distinctive voice.

Jerry Potter was sitting next to me and said that he had read some of my Power Plant posts, but that he never read anything about himself.  I realized that if I had written about Jerry, it would have been in passing in a post about someone else (I mentioned him in the post about the Power Plant Birthday Phantom because his birthday was the second one in January), because even though I held Jerry in high regard, I never really worked directly with Jerry.  He worked on the heavy equipment in the coal yard, and the only time I interacted with him was when I was working on the coal dumper.  The first time I met Jerry Potter I immediately thought of him as Slim Pickens younger brother.  They looked so much alike.

Jerry just turned 65 last month (January 2026).  I first met him when he was 21 or 22 years old.  Just to give you an idea of the history that these men had with each other.  Maybe at future events, Jerry will share a story with me that I can write about.  The coal yard operators lived in a world of their own, working shift work up on the hill driving heavy equipment back and forth across the coal pile and running the dumper that dumped the coal from the coal trains that had travelled all the way from Wyoming to bring us black chunks of preprocessed electricity.

This is all just an introduction to the story I want to share about the engineer who flexed his muscle, as the title of this post suggests (or explicitly states).  You see, one person that was NOT at the luncheon was Ray Eberle.  Ray was one person I really wanted to see when I visited Stillwater.  He and I had spent the last three years I worked at the plant sitting side-by-side working on our computers making the company’s all-encompassing enterprise resource planning application SAP smarter.  You can read about our endeavor in this post:  Tales of Power Plant Prowess by Ray Eberle.   So, I had messaged Ray the night before the get-together to see if he was going to be going.  He told me he was busy building a house on the east side of Stillwater, and he was going to be there most of the day.  So, we arranged to meet around 9:00 in the morning.  The lunch didn’t start until 11:00.

Well.  I was late making it to the lunch by 15 minutes, because spending just two hours with Ray isn’t usually enough.  Ray is one of the most interesting people on the planet, and time flies when you are with him.  The three years when I worked with Ray flew by so fast, I think I developed wind burn on my face.

When I was talking with Ray, he told me the following story.  This is where the engineer comes into the picture.

After I left the plant to begin the next part of my life, Ray, either because he was too heartbroken because I was gone, or because he wanted a change of scenery, had moved into a room across the hall from where we had set up shop in the Master Print Room.  Nine years after I was gone in 2010, while Ray continued improving the SAP application by entering Bill of Materials on all of the parts used by the Power Plant, a new engineer suddenly entered his office.

Ray was sitting there behind his desk focusing on his work:

In walked the new young engineer. Steven Jones (I think that’s his name).  I do not have a picture of Steven, and it’s just as well.  I don’t think he would want me to post it here.  Keep in mind, Ray Eberle was a mechanic.  His regular job was to work in the maintenance shop when his expertise was needed.

When Steven Jones, came into Ray’s office, he asked Ray, “What is it you do here?”

Ray’s response was “I’m a mechanic”. — unexpressive stare — oh.  Like the picture above.

The engineer Steven turned around and left.  Something about this exchange obviously had ruffled the feathers of the newly hatched engineer, because after a few minutes, he returned, and asked Ray, “How is it that you have a desk when you are just a mechanic?”

If Ray even responded, he probably just said, “Because I do.”  This seemed to rile the young engineer even further, because evidently based on his question, this new engineer didn’t have a desk.  He was probably using a table or was in a cubicle in the engineer’s room down the hall.  He left in a huff once again.

A little while later.  Let’s say, fifteen minutes or so, this young man returned to Ray’s domicile and said, “Come with me.  I want to show you something.”  So, Ray, ceased his productive computer venture and set out to discover what sort of fancies young engineers wish to share with the common mechanic.

Ray followed Steven into another nearby room, where he pointed to an unused desk.  Steven said, “I would like for you to move this desk into my office over here.”  Ray said, “Okay”. Then the engineer turned around and left.

Ray then left the office area for a little while, and when he came back and was walking down the hallway, he saw John Belusko (an operator) walking by.

Ray asked John if he would help him move a desk for the new engineer, and John indicated that he would be glad to help Ray.  So, Ray picked up one end of the desk and John the other and they headed down the hallway.  When they passed the engineer’s office, John said, “Hey, don’t you want to go in there?”

Ray said, “Just follow me.  I’ll show you where we need to put it.”  So, Ray and John carried the desk down to the end of the hall and made their way out onto the Turbine Room floor.

Ray had already moved the overhead crane into position and had some slings ready to tie the desk to the overhead crane hook.  At the end of the Turbine Room floor there is a crane bay that goes all the way down to the bottom floor (6 stories down).

At the bottom of the crane bay, there was a large dumpster:

Ray and John lowered the desk into the dumpster as a large truck was hooking the dumpster up to be hauled away.  Then John returned to the Control Room while Ray went back to work making himself useful again.

A few minutes later, the young engineer Steven Jones entered Ray’s abode once again.  This time he said, “Ray!  I thought I asked you to move the desk into my room.  Where is it?”

Ray, wishing to asway the young man’s concern, said, “Follow me.”

Ray took Steven down the hall and out onto the Turbine Room floor.  He pointed down at the dumpster that was just leaving the crane bay on the trailer of the truck and pointing at the desk laying upside down in the dumpster said, “There’s your desk.”  Ray turned around and headed back to his room to work on his tasks and make himself a hand for the electric company once more leaving the engineer staring down at his power dwindling away.

When Steven Jones had asked Ray what he did here (at the plant) and he answered that he was a mechanic, what Ray failed to mention was that he was one of the world’s leading Turbine Generator Specialists specializing in General Electric Generators.  He was also a renown storyteller throughout the lower 48 states who holds several degrees in Bard-ology.  What the young engineer had yet to learn was that the men and women that maintained the equipment in the plant were all specialists in their own fields with decades of experience working with the leading mechanics from across the nation that came to work alongside them throughout the years.

Nobody, not even the plant manager would treat these men and women disrespectfully.  Because they would be doing it at their own peril.  (as some learned the hard way).

One more note:

The Power Plant post I wrote just before this post was written in 2021.  I reposted it last week.  It was about the first summer when I went to work at the plant in 1979 as a summer help.  In that post I wrote about the day I was assigned to assemble office desks.  You can read about this in the post “Power Plant Desk Job“.  It occurred to me after I wrote this post about Ray Eberle and the engineer that the desk that Ray lowered into the Dumpster could have been one of the desks that we assembled that summer in 1979, 31 years earlier.  So, in a small way, I may have played one little role in the education of the young engineer that day.

One final note:

John Belusko passed away on December 7, 2019.  I saw Facebook light up that day with posts remembering him when he died.  Since he was a devout Catholic and an even better Power Plant Man, I’m sure that while we are holding our Power Plant Reunion at the Mexican Restaurant in Stillwater Oklahoma every three months, John is up there in Heaven with all the other true Power Plant Men in heaven, gathered around a table looking down on us, waiting for the time when we will all be reunited.  Here is the picture on his Obituary for Strode’s Funeral Home:

Revised 1/24/2026

Many years after I had completed writing four years of Power Plant Posts, I realized that I hadn’t quite finished writing all of the stories I should have included.  Back on August 4, 2021, I added this post to the 208 original stories I had written:

Originally posted 8/4/2021

Back in November 2015 I wrote a post about how in November 2000 I realized that I was probably going to have to leave the Power Plant because I was not able to apply for an IT job in my own company.  You can read about it here:  Crack in Power Plant Armor leads to Gaping Hole in Logic.  A month later I wrote a post about how I was moving to Round Rock Texas to work for Dell:  The Heart of a Power Plant.  I thought it would be interesting to describe my experience interviewing with different companies.  The difference between companies was very noticeable.

I’m not including all of the companies I interviewed, because that was about 45 different companies.  Only those where I had an interesting adventure:

One of the first companies I interviewed with was ABF, a trucking company.  ABF stands for “Arkansas Best Freight”.  The headquarters was in Fort Smith, Arkansas.  After my first interview they asked me to drive to Arkansas for a second interview, which I did on my day off (as we were working 4 – 10s at the time, we had some weekdays off).  I took my wife Kelly and the kids with me and made a trip out of it.  They fed us a lunch and paid for my driving expenses and they drove us around town.  I think I was more interested in the nearby Nuclear Power Plant than I was ABF.

After it was all said and done, they decided not to hire me.  They were looking for someone younger who wasn’t such a troublemaker.  — I had explained how I wrote the program that wrote the script language for GLink so the foremen could take their work home and still do their mainframe work.  You can read about that here:  Power Plant Men Take the Corporate Mainframe Computer Home.

I think it was when I described the Birthday Phantom application to them, that they became a little wary.  After all, it did end up sending emails to the user from themselves announcing that it was someone’s birthday that day.  — 10 years before Facebook came around and now does the same thing.  You can read about that story here:  Power Plant Birthday Phantom.

When they sent me a polite rejection letter telling me they decided not to hire me, I wasn’t surprised.  Kelly was relieved, because she wasn’t looking forward to a possible move to Fort Smith Arkansas.  Even though I wasn’t surprised, Kelly was.  She figured anyone would want to snatch me up if they had the chance.  When she asked me, “What’s the deal?  Why wouldn’t they want someone with a 4.0 GPA?” I just replied, “I don’t know.  I think they want someone younger they wouldn’t have to pay so much.”  We just breathed a sigh of relief and moved on.

Another company I wasn’t too excited about was DST Systems in Kansas City.  They housed the Mutual Fund transactions for all but a couple of the Mutual fund companies in the US.  I had grown up in Missouri and I had a lot of Italian relatives living in Kansas City.  I had spent a lot of time there.  The company flew me up there and put me in a nice hotel for the night.

Then the next morning they gave us a tour of their data center that is inside a cave on the south side of Kansas City, 5 miles from my Aunt Ginny’s house, and about 3 miles from where my grandfather used to live. They were really proud of the fact that their data center contained 70 Terabytes of data!  That’s funny to think about today.  Just a couple of years later, Dell’s data warehouse had over a Petabyte of data, or 1000 Terabytes. (Years later in 2018, after working at General Motors, I learned that a self-driving car collects over a petabyte of data in one month).

After the tour of the data center in the cave, (where I was more impressed by their backup generators, since they looked like the those we used at our power plant) they drove us downtown and interviewed. me.  — When I say, “Us”, I mean the other college students applying for the jobs.

I had heard that they liked to ask you technical Java questions, so I was prepared for their question, which was, “If you needed to do this, this and this, how would you write the code in Java?”  When they asked me this question my response was, “Do I need to know Java on the day I start the job?”  They replied, “No, we will teach you the way we write Java”.  — I already knew that was the case before the interview.  That’s why I asked that.

Then I said, “I took Java a year and half ago in an accelerated summer course and made an A in it.  I haven’t used Java since, so I don’t remember the exact syntax, but this is how I would write the code….”  — They offered me the job, but the pay was too low.  This wasn’t a rejection, but I was glad to turn them down.  There was something depressing about the company, even though I couldn’t put my finger on it.

The one company all the IT students wanted to work for was Williams Communication in Tulsa.  They held a reception in one of the new buildings on campus in the evening, which I attended.  I talked to a couple of classmates from the last couple of years that had gone to work for them and were now helping to recruit new employees.

They told me that during the interview they were on the lookout for people who came to the interview well prepared.  They didn’t want to hire them! This was because they figured that their answers weren’t necessarily “honest”.  I found this rather confusing.  I was going to be well prepared for the interview, and now they are telling me that they want me to act as if I wasn’t.

So, the next day during the interview when they came to the point where they asked, “Do you have any questions?”  I responded by asking, “When someone attends a meeting at your company, do you expect them to be prepared to discuss the topic at hand when they show up, or do you prefer they just go to the meeting unprepared and make it up on the fly?”

When they replied that they expected the person to be prepared for the meeting (which I knew they would), I asked, “When I was preparing for this interview, I talked with some of the recruiters yesterday that I knew, because they were in my classes in the past.  They told me that during this interview you are looking for people that are prepared for this meeting.  If they are, then you don’t want to hire them.  How does that make sense if you expect them to show up for a meeting prepared but not an interview?”

The two young guys interviewing me looked a little embarrassed and just shrugged their shoulders.  Needless to say, they didn’t offer me a job.  The following week while I was in various classes, I heard others talking excitedly about being offered jobs with Williams Communication beginning when they graduate in May.  This was the company a lot of students wanted to go to work.  They evidently gave a lot of perks to their employees.  It was their dream job, and it was in Tulsa, not too far from Stillwater.

Many of the students going to work for Williams, had arranged to move to Tulsa at the end of school.  They had hired over 200 students.  A couple of people had already moved and were commuting to class.  Then the news hit the fan (so to speak).  Williams Communication was in financial trouble, and they were not only not hiring the students they said they were going to hire, but they were laying people off.  I considered myself lucky to not have been offered the job 6 months earlier.

I had a similar “scare” during the first week of May when Dell, (who had been laying off a lot of employees all spring — This was the Millennium Internet bust) called to tell me that they were moving my start date from the beginning of June until August 20 as I discussed in the post linked above, “The Heart of a Power Plant”, so I knew what some of the students were going through.  My problem was that I was in the middle of selling my house in Stillwater, Oklahoma and buying a house in Round Rock, Texas at the same time.

I had an interview with Wal-Mart and they offered me a job.  The pay wasn’t that good.  Before I even considered whether to accept it, I went to a “social” where they had a meeting to explain what working for Wal-Mart would be like as an IT employee.  While they were talking, one of the people giving the presentation recognized one of the students in the room and asked her if she would like to stand up and tell how it was last summer when she worked there as an intern.

The young girl stood up and walked to the front of the room.  She looked around at the Wal-Mart representatives and smiled.  Then she looked at the audience of eager students waiting to hear about all the great things about working for Wal-Mart.  Then she spoke.  She hesitantly said, “Well (pause).   I cried a lot.”  The room burst into laughter.

The Wal-Mart recruiters were as surprised as everyone else.  They asked her to explain.  So she told us that one day she went to run a job on the mainframe and when she did, she shutdown all of Argentina for about 30 minutes.  They informed her that they lost millions of dollars in that time.  She said that no one told her that you weren’t supposed to run jobs like that during working hours.

I knew exactly how she felt.  I had tried compiling a program on our mainframe at the Electric Company one day just for fun, and a little while later someone from the IT department called the Power Plant wanting to speak to Kevin Breazile.  — Yeah.  I had locked up the mainframe until the program finished compiling.

They asked me if they could kill the job.  I told them “Sure!”  This was after I had been scolded by Tom Gibson, our Electric Supervisor after the plant had been contacted by the President of the company because I had sent something to everyone’s printer and messed up all the billing, payroll and work order jobs.  See the post Power Plant Customer Service Team Gone Wild.

Then came Boeing.  I was interviewing for a job in Wichita.  When they found out that I was both an IT person and an Electrician they offered to hire me right on the spot.  They asked me to give my 2 week notice and they would move me to Wichita where I could start as soon as possible.  They said that I could work on fighter planes, both wiring them and programming them.  This was very tempting.

I told the recruiters that I would like to get my degree before I would leave the electric company.  After all, they were paying for my classes.  I only had 6 more hours after the current semester, and if they wanted to talk next semester, I would be willing to discuss it with them then.  They said that if I went to work for Boeing I would receive a $3,000 bonus when I receive my degree, if there was some way to make that work.  That was the last time I heard from them.  My wife wasn’t too keen about moving to Wichita anyway, so, I took that as a good thing.  Although….

I also interviewed with Koch Industry in Wichita and they did interview me on-site (twice).  When they offered me a job and I told them that the pay was not enough.  Then they called me back a few weeks later and I went up to interview again. This time with their pipeline switching team.  It turned out that they were using a system called “PI” that we used at our Power Plant.  I mentioned this in the post:  Power Plant Control Room Operator and the Life of Pi.  By that time, I had the offer from Dell and Koch said they couldn’t pay me what I was asking.

An interesting thing happened when I was on site for the interview.  That morning they had found one of the Koch Industry employees brutally murdered in his home (I think I watched a Forensics Files many years later about this murder).  This had unnerved the employees and they were sort of on “lock down”.  They didn’t really want to advertise that, but when the recruiter was having lunch with me in their cafeteria, she mentioned it to me.

JD Edwards was a competitor with SAP at the time.  I had an advantage when I interviewed with them, because I had been working on SAP for the past 3 years.  They flew me to Denver and I stayed in a nice hotel just across the parking lot from their office.  By this time, I was used to flying with a few other 4.0 students who had been offered jobs from the same companies I had.  Some who ended up working at Dell when we were all said and done.

While I was in the interview and they found out that I knew the SAP Maintenance Module and worked for the company that had worked with SAP to develop it, the person interviewing me became excited and left to go find another person to come into help with the interview.  JD Edwards wanted to develop their own Maintenance Module and since I knew both systems (as I had taken a computer course in school where we worked on JD Edwards’ One World application), They were eager to hire me.

They offered me more than any other company, but when I looked at the cost of living in the area around their office (which was not far from Columbine High School), I told them they would have to go higher.  They went back and forth with me, but couldn’t come up to where I would accept their offer.

As a follow-up to this story…. In the year 2005, I went to Denver for some training with Kronos, our timekeeping system at Dell.  I ended up staying in the same hotel where I stayed when I interviewed with JD Edwards.  Their building was just across the parking lot.  It was abandoned.

JD Edwards had been bought by Oracle a couple of years after I interviewed with them, and they just liquidated their IT department in Denver.  So.  I dodged a bullet with that one.

The same thing happened with Sprint.  This was another company a lot of students were interested in.  They had a nice campus in Overland Park Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City.  I began the interview by joking around with the recruiters who were older people like me.  I told them where they could find a nice place to eat dinner and other stuff like that.

They didn’t like my answer to the question, “Who is Sprint’s number one competitor?”  I told them, “Technology”. They asked me to explain, and I told them that in one day a new technology can come out and make their company obsolete.  They didn’t seem to like that answer.  I know they were looking for the answer, “AT&T and T-Mobile.”  Like I said, I wasn’t too eager to move to Kansas City (Overland Park is a suburb of KC).

Sprint didn’t offer me a job, but they did offer it to another older student who was a friend of mine, who was eager to move to Overland Park in May.  I suppose he eventually did.  Then in 2003 when I was in another training class in Overland Park for Kronos, I met up with my best friend of all time Jesse Cheng.

While we were driving around town, we passed the Sprint campus where my friend from class would have worked.  The campus was abandoned.  Jesse said they closed it about a year before.  — Whew. Glad they didn’t offer me a job there.

As a side note on 1/24/2026:  Jesse Cheng ended up working at General Motors as the resident doctor at the factory in Fairfax Kansas, and then at Arlington, TX while I was working at General Motors.  The last time I talked with Jesse was…. Yesterday.  We have been friends now for 50 years.

My favorite interview story is this:  I interviewed on campus with Fleming Foods.  A Supermarket chain in Oklahoma City.  Many of the people on the board of directors of our electric company were also on the board of directors for Fleming Foods.  After the first interview I received an email stating that my next interview was going to be in Oklahoma City on the Monday afternoon two weeks from then.  I immediately responded and said that I had a prior commitment during that time and would not be able to attend the interview (I had a test in one of my classes during that time), and I asked if they could reschedule the interview.

I didn’t hear back from the recruiter to reschedule the interview.  The next time I received an email was the Friday before the Monday when the interview was scheduled.  It reminded me to show up for the interview and gave instructions as to where to go, etc.  When I received the email, I immediately wrote and told them that as I had already indicated, I would not be able to attend the interview on Monday due to a prior commitment, and I had asked if the interview could be rescheduled.

The recruiter wrote back saying that it was very inconsiderate of me since a lot of trouble had been put into scheduling the people for the interviews and that valuable time would be wasted by important managers if I didn’t show up for the interview.  — I thought…. “Wow.  This is a great way to inspire students to come and work for Fleming Foods.”  So, I responded….

I said this:  “In my past experience I have found that the culture in the HR department generally reflects the overall culture of a company.  I thank you for showing me the culture found at Fleming Foods.  First of all, you totally ignored my response when I indicated two weeks ago that I would not be able to attend the interview by not responding and not attempting to reschedule it.  You have shown me that Fleming Foods is not a company that I would want to work for.  Please cancel the interview and do not try to reschedule it.  Thanks again for the heads up.”

I went to work for Dell in the end.  The Post “The Heart of the Power Plant” linked above tells the story about moving down to Round Rock to work for Dell.  As Paul Harvey used to say, “Now you know the Rest of the Story”.

Revised 1/11/2026

Originally posted December 19, 2015

August 16, 2001, was my final day at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.  I had stepped onto the plant grounds May 7, 1979, 22 years earlier.  Now I was leaving to change careers and moving to Round Rock, Texas to work for Dell Computers as a programmer.  During my final day, a going away party was held in my honor by the Power Plant Men and Women that I had the privilege to work alongside during the past 22 years.

A few minutes before the party began, I slipped into the office bathroom/locker room and changed into a navy-blue suit and tie.  Combed my hair.  Put on black socks with my shiny black shoes.  Grabbed my briefcase and headed for the break room.  When I walked in the room, it was packed full of Power Plant Men and Women all waiting to say goodbye to one of their family.

Many wondered who it was that had joined their party of one of their own.  Who was this person in the suit and tie?  Ed Shiever told me later that he didn’t even recognize me.  It wasn’t until I reached out and shook his hand that he realized that he was Kevin Breazile.  The same person he had known since he was a temp employee working in the tool room.

When the Power Plant Men finally realized that I was the person they had been waiting for, they broke out in applause as I walked around shaking their hands.  I would have broke out in tears if I hadn’t been thinking about what a great person each of them had been over the many years we had known each other.

I made my way to the front of the room where I had set up a computer and hooked it to the big screen TV.  I had a special surprise waiting for them.  One that would temporarily change the plant policy on going away parties after I was gone.  I had prepared a special PowerPoint presentation for them (insert evil grin here).

I set my briefcase next to the computer on the end of the table acting as if the computer had nothing to do with the party.  Then I stood there as the “going away” part of the party began.

It was typical for people to stand up and tell a story or two about the person leaving, so Jim Arnold (the Supervisor of Maintenance and my part time nemesis) was first.  He explained how I had been working on SAP for the past three years creating tasks lists that are used to describe each possible job in the plant.

He turned to me and asked me how many task lists I had created in the last 3 years.   I replied, “About 17,800”.  Jim said that this boggled his mind.  It was three times more than the entire rest of the company put together.

Jim made a comment about how he wasn’t sure he would want a job where you have to dress up in a suit and tie.

Andy Tubbs stood up and presented me with my 20 year safety sticker and a leather backpack for working 20 years without an accident, which was completed on August 11, just 5 days before.  I had worked four summers as a summer help, which counted as one year of service, then I had completed 19 years as a full time employee that very same week.

I like being roasted, but that didn’t really happen.  A few other people told some stories about me, that I can’t recall because I was busy thinking about the PowerPoint presentation.  I had memorized my entire script, and the presentation was pretty much automatic and timed, and I had to keep to my script or pause the presentation.

Then Jim Arnold asked me (Bill Green, the Plant Manager was gone that day visiting the Muskogee Plant – was it on purpose?  Hmmm.) if I had anything I would like to say before I left…. That was the cue I had been waiting for.  I replied, “Actually, I have a PowerPoint presentation right here, and I hit a key, and the TV lit up….

I will present each of the 26 slides below with the comments I made during each one.  Since many of the slides are animated, I will try to describe how that worked as I made my presentation… so, hang on… this is going to be a lot of slides….  I broke it down into about 45 pictures.  The Script is what I said for each slide:

Script:

Remember when Mark Draper came here for a year and when he was getting ready to leave, he gave a presentation about where he thought we were doing well, and how we could improve ourselves? (See the post UK Kudos for Okie Power Plant)

I thought that since I have spent 20 years with you guys, I might be able to come up with a few comments.  Especially as opinionated as I am.

 

Script:

In 1979, I came to work here as a summer help.  The plant was still being built and I was really impressed with the special quality of people I met and looked up to.

Script continues as these three pictures slide in:

Like for instance there was Sonny Karcher and another was Jerry Mitchell.  It has been a while since I have seen these two guys, and I know that Jerry has passed on, but this is the way I remember them.

And of course Larry Riley was there.

Larry was the one I worked with back then that seemed to know what was going on.  I will always consider him a good friend.

When I was on Labor Crew I would call him “Dad”.  He would never own up to it.  He said I was never the same after I fell on my head when I was a kid.

I used to get really dirty when I worked in the coal yard right alongside Jerry Mitchell.  He would stay perfectly clean.  He told me that I knew I was good when I could keep myself clean.  —

Well.  I have found a better way to do that. (as I pretended to brush lint off of my jacket). (some laughter).  Once again, I would like to thank OG&E for paying for my education.

I encourage all the new guys to seriously consider taking advantage of the free education benefit.

Script:

Then of course there was our Plant Manager and Assistant Manager back then.

This is how I remember them.

 

Script:

After hiring on permanently as a janitor in ’82, and getting on Labor crew in the spring of ’83.  I was able to get into the electric shop in November 1983.

I vividly remember my first day as an electrician.  The first thing I worked on, I shorted it to ground.

Script continues as Charles Foster’s picture slides in:

With no prior experience as an electrician I was allowed to join the electric shop.  Charles Foster was instrumental in getting me into the shop, and I am grateful.  As everyone knows, Charles is a long time friend of mine.

For years and years Charles would tell the story about how he fought tooth and nail for me against the evil Plant Manager and His diabolic Assistant who wanted me to be banished to the Labor Crew for eternity.

Not too long ago I told Charles that if he hadn’t pushed so hard to get me into the electric shop, I probably would have left OG&E and went back to school years ago (like my mom wanted me to do) and made something of myself long before now.

Script:

These are the electricians that were there when I first joined the electric shop.  These are the only ones left.  I think we started out with 16. (That’s me in the lower right).

The electricians were always a tight knit group.  It amazed me to see electricians who couldn’t stand each other sit down and play dominos three times a day, every day, year after year.

Jimmie Moore joined the shop some time later.

And of course.  Bill Bennett was around back then.

When I arrived in the electric shop I was 23 years old and I replaced Diana Brien as the youngest electrician in the shop.  As I leave, I am almost 41 years old, and I am still the youngest electrician.  As I leave, I relinquish the title back to Diana Brien who once again will be the youngest electrician.

As a side note…. I don’t know why I forgot about Ben Davis.  He reminded me after the presentation… I don’t know how… Here is a picture of Ben:

Script:

I suppose you all remember what happened on February 15th, 1985.  The day we refer to as “Black Friday”.  The day that the “Drug and Theft” ring was busted up at Sooner Station.  That was the day that a very dear friend of mine, Pat Braden, whom everyone knew as a kind easy going person turned out to be some evil leader of a theft ring.

Note:  As I was saying the above statement, This mummy walked across the slide…

Note:  Then Barney slide across in the other direction…

Script continued:

Well.  I know better than that. I will always remember Pat Braden with a smile on his face.  Mickey Postman, I know you would agree with me about Pat and just about everyone else who knew him well.

It has been 16 years since this took place and the company has gone through a lot of changes, but don’t ever think something like this couldn’t happen again.

Note… The hammers come in and stomp the images off the slide….

Script:

Then there was the first Reorganization.  The old people retired on October 1st.  That was the end of the Moler and Waugh regime.

Script:

At first we thought we were all on vacation. Our new plant manager came in the first meeting with us and told a joke.

We all looked at each other and wondered, “Can plant managers even do that?”

I’m sure you guys remember Ron Kilman.  Bless his heart.

Script:

The second part of the first reorganization allowed people without jobs to find a position in the company over a 8 month period.

Note:  Pictures of Scott Hubbard fly in along with the words:  “Hubbard Here!”  then each one disappears leaving this:

Script:

That is when Scott Hubbard joined the electric shop.

Scott and I drove to work together for a long time and we became good friends.

I’ll miss Scott when I leave.  I’ll remember that while “Hubbard is Here”, while I’ll be down there – in Texas.

 

Script:

Do you remember the Quality Process?  They said it was a process and not a program because when a program is over it goes away, and a process is something that will always be here.  — Yeah right.

Note:  While I was saying this, the screen all of the sudden went dark as I kept talking… I could tell that people wondered if I realized that the presentation had suddenly disappeared….

Script:

This is all we have left of the Quality Process.

Note:

When I said the line “This is all we have left of the Quality Process”  pointing my thumb over my shoulder with a look of disappointment on my face, the room suddenly burst out into cheers and applause as they realized that the blank screen represented the current state of the Quality process at the plant.

Script:

The first reorganization was done in a somewhat orderly manner.

They retired the old guys out first and brought in the new management, then they informed those that didn’t have positions and gave them time to find a job before they let them go.

Note:  The sounds of gun shots were barely heard from the computer speaker, as splats occurred on the slide until it looked like this:

Script continued:

The second reorganization.  Well.  It was a massacre.

It was a very lousy way to do this, and very humiliating.

Note:

Jim Arnold at this point was about to jump out of his chair and stop the show (since he was instrumental in making the downsizing as brutal as possible), so I was quick to go to the next slide…

Script:

With the redesign came another Plant Manager.  One of the first things I remember about Bill Green was that one morning I was stopped at the front gate and given a 9 volt battery for my smoke detector.

I took the battery home and put it in my smoke detector, and – guess what? – The battery was dead.  And I thought, “Oh well.  These things happen.”

Well a couple of years later, there was Bill Green handing out smoke detector batteries again.

I checked it out and sure enough, it was dead also.

 

Note:  As I was talking during this slide, the marbles dropped in and bounced around then at the end the hat and moustache landed on Bill Green.

Script:

I am just wondering. I want to test out a theory I have.   How many of you was given a dead battery?

—  OK, I see.  Just the trouble makers.  I understand.  It all makes sense to me now.

Second Note:  Bill Green had a jar full of marbles and each color represented a type of injury someone has when they do something unsafe.  Most of the marbles were blue and meant that nothing happened, the other colors represented increasingly worse injuries.  Two marbles in the jar signified fatalities.

The numbers went like this:

Out of 575 incidents where someone does something unsafe, here are the consequences:

390 Blue Marbles:   Nothing happens

113 Green Marbles:  A First Aid injury

57 White Marbles:  A Recordable Accident

8 Pink Marbles:  Up to 30 days lost work day injury occurs

5 Red Marbles:  60 or  more lost workdays injury occurs

2 Yellow Marbles:  A Fatality occurs

Script:

The Maintenance workers are the best people I know.  Everyone one of them has treated me with respect, and I consider each of you a friend.

You are the people I will miss.  Not the coal dust, not the fly ash. —  Just the people.

Note:  Over the next set of slides, I showed the Power Plant Men I worked with… I will show you a couple of pictures of some slides to show you the animation that I had slide in and I’ll explain them.. I didn’t say much during the following slides.  They flashed by fairly quickly:

Note:  The circle with the slash over Bob Blubaugh represented him being recently fired… The story around this is on some of the last slides… and was a tragedy.  The military cap landed on Randy Daily (in the lower right) because he was an Army Medic and was always in charge when it came to safety.

The donut flew up to Danny Cain because if there was ever free food somewhere, Danny would find it… Especially if they were donuts.

 

The words “Huh, Huh?” flew to Jody Morse, because he had the habit of saying something and ending his sentence with “Huh, Huh?”

Note:  That was the end of the pictures of the Maintenance Power Plant Men….  I didn’t have pictures of the Operators, and they weren’t at the party…

Script:

Without these two, you wouldn’t get paid, and you wouldn’t get parts.

I agree with what Jerry Osborn said about Linda Shiever.  There isn’t anyone out here that can do the job Linda does every day.

Script:

The maintenance foremen have treated me with respect and I would like to thank all of you for that.

Note:  Then Jim Arnold flew in:

Script:

I realize that you have to do certain things some times because there is someone looking over your shoulders directing every move you make.

Note:  At this point, Jim leaned forward in his chair to get a better look… wondering if that was his face on this picture of God…

Script:

Yes, Jim Arnold does take care of us, and we know that he doesn’t want to retire and leave us to fend for ourselves.

Note:  There was a policy where you could retire once your age and years of service added up to 80 years.  Jim Arnold’s added up to 100, but wouldn’t retire.

Note:  Still talking about Jim Arnold:

Script:

Therefore he has devised a plan in case of an untimely death.

So don’t be smilin’ too big!!

Note: Still talking about Jim Arnold….

Script:

He will be able to direct the plant operations from his heavenly throne.

So don’t worry.  He is NOT going away.

Second Note:  At this point the PowerPoint presentation locked up on the computer… I had to shut down the presentation and restart it, and quickly go back to the next slide… I remembered the Alt-F4 closes the active application, so I was able to do this within about 15 seconds.

Script:

Do you remember when Bill Moler decided that you had to wear a hardhat to go fishin’ in the discharge?

He said it was because he wanted everyone to be safe.

As you can see, this made Johnny Keys rather upset.

Note:  As I was speaking, Hardhats dropped onto the people:

Script:

Some bird might fly overhead and  drop something on you.

Everyone knew the real reason.  He didn’t want anyone fishing out there, so he was making it more difficult to do that.

He used “Safety” as an excuse.  Because of this, he lost credibility when it came to safety issues.

Note:  The Hard hats disappeared and Cell phones and pagers dropped down as I said the following:

Script:

When you start making policies that use safety as an excuse, but it isn’t the real reason, you lose your credibility.

Second Note:  At this point, Jim Arnold was jumping up from his seat… You see, Jim Arnold had fired Bob Blubaugh a few months earlier because Bob carried a cell phone with him while he was working.  Jim told him he couldn’t use his cell phone during the day.  When Bob refused to stop carrying a cell phone Jim Arnold fired him for insubordination.

Today that seems crazy as everyone carries cell phones.  Jim’s excuse was that carrying a cell phone was not safe, though he couldn’t exactly explain why.

That’s why Jim jumped out of his chair… I thought it was over, and I had two more slides to go….  So, I quickly clicked to the next slide… and Jim sat back down…. whew….

Script:

I would like to say goodbye to Doug Black.  I have been blessed to have been able to spend time with you the past three years.

Note:

Then Doug slid off the slide leaving a picture of Toby:

Script:

I would like to say goodbye to Toby, you have been a good friend, and I’ll stay in touch.

Note:  Then Toby slid off and Ray Eberle’s picture was left:

Script:

Ray, I had to hide this picture from you, because you sat next to me as I created this presentation.  I just want to say that the last three years we have spent working on SAP have meant a lot to me and you will always be one of my best friends.  Thank you.

Script:

With that I will say “Goodbye” to all of you.  Thank you!

Note:  This is a picture of Jim Arnold and Louise Kalicki stepping off of Air Force One.  I super-imposed their faces over Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is the end of the presentation….  With that I was ready to leave the plant and begin the next stage of my life.  I will explain more in the post next week.

After I had left, I heard that when the next person had a going away party, Bill Green announced that PowerPoint Presentations are no longer allowed during going away parties!

Revised 1/4/2026

Originally posted December 12, 2015

It is not clear how many heart attacks one Power Plant Man can have.  Walt Oswalt probably had a heart attack on a monthly basis, but rarely let anyone know about it.  Ray Eberle dropped by Walt’s farm one day to visit and found Walt out in the pasture passed out next to his combine as if dead.  When Ray began following the ABC’s for safety he found that Walt was still breathing.  Upon reviving him, Walt just said that he was tired and decided to take a nap.  Ray knew that he had just had another heart attack but didn’t want to admit it.

The best way to revive Walt at this point, we found, was to say out loud that we were going to take him to the hospital in Ponca City.  At that time, no one would be caught dead going there…. or maybe they would.  At least when they were discharged.

Walt had a different way of looking at the world.  It was probably brought on by a combination of being a long time Power Plant Man and being partly insane… in a likable sort of way… if you already have a good sense of humor.  If your sense of humor is lacking, then Walt may have appeared annoying.

Either way, Walt bounced between one adventure to another.

One day Ray Eberle, who considered Walt a dear friend, dropped by to visit him (which was a common occurrence).  When Ray walked into the living room of Walt’s double-wide, he found two coffin-like boxes laying in the middle of the floor.  Ray asked Walt why he had two wooden coffins laying on his living room floor, half thinking that maybe Walt was thinking ahead and found a deal on a couple of cheap coffins on the Internet.

Walt explained that the two boxes contained a marketing tool that was going to be the key to his success.  Walt decided to open one of the boxes and show Ray instead of trying to explain his new idea, so he took a pry bar and pried open the lid on one of the wooden coffins.  In all of Ray’s imagination, he had not figured on seeing what he saw when the lid was lifted from the box.

Carefully stacked inside the box were 50 high dollar pool cues.

Walt pulled one of the pool cues out of the box and showed Ray that each one was carefully engraved with the following words:

“Walt’s Excavating and Dirt Movers – Why go anywhere else when Walt can cheat you just the same?”   Then it had his phone number.

Walt explained to Ray that all he had to do was go down to each of the bars in the Morrison and Pawnee areas and hand out these pool cues to everyone, and before long, everyone in town will see his advertisement because “Everyone shoots pool and drinks beer.”

Ray looked at the satisfied look on Walt’s face as he was explaining his new business adventure and replied, “But I don’t shoot pool and drink beer.”  Walt said, “Yeah, but everyone else does.”  Walt also added that people will think that the part about “cheating you as good as anyone else” is a joke…. but it isn’t.

Ray was curious as he examined the very expensive pool cues and the fine engraving, so he asked Walt how much each of these pool cues cost.  Walt explained that since he had ordered 100 of them, he was able to get them at a discount of $75 each (or so.  I don’t remember the exact cost).  I do know that this added up to $7,500 worth of pool cues that Walt was going to give away for free.

Walt’s dream was that his tractor with the scoop shovel and dirt grater was going to be busy all over the county leveling roads and moving dirt.  Ray watched as Walt’s wife walked through the room with a slightly disgusted look on her face as she glanced over at the two coffins on the living room floor.  Ray decided to keep quiet until the storm had passed.

When Ray was telling me this story, I wondered how many times Walt’s wife had a heart attack.

On another occasion, Ray Eberle went to visit with Walt after work.  Walt invited Ray into the kitchen to have a drink of water.  Ray was admiring the new carpet Walt just had installed in the house.

As they sat there talking, Ray noticed that a complete window frame with the glass already installed was next to the kitchen table leaning against the wall.  Since Walt didn’t mention the window frame right away, Ray finally asked, “Walt, what are you planning on doing with this Window?”

Walt explained that he bought the window on sale and since he wanted to put another window in kitchen, he bought it.  Ray looked around the kitchen and wondered where Walt could possibly add a new window.  He wasn’t sure where Walt could add a window.  So, knowing Walt, he figured that the fastest way to find out was to ask…. because assuming only led to obvious solutions.

“Walt, where in the kitchen are you going to put the window?”  Walt pointed to the wall directly behind Ray where there was a blank white wall.  “I’m going to put the window right there.”

Ray saw a flaw in this logic immediately, but decided to wait 30 seconds or so in order to check his logic with reality, just to make sure he wasn’t mistaken…. when he was sure, Ray replied, “But Walt…. Isn’t your bedroom on the other side of that wall?”

Without pausing Walt said, “Yeah.  I want to be able to see what’s happening in the kitchen when I’m in bed.”  Ray’s right hand slowly grabbed the edge of the table in order to steady himself, so that he didn’t spill the glass of water in his left hand.

At this point, Walt ensured Ray that he always wanted to have a window right there as he reached into a kitchen drawer and retrieved a claw hammer.

Walt walked over to the wall and said, “I am going to put that window right here… and using the claw on the hammer, he began tearing a hole in the sheet rock.  Ray, a little shocked backed off to give Walt room as he began destroying the wall in the kitchen.

Sheet rock was flying all over the new carpet, and Ray noticed that as Walt was attacking the wall, he was grinding the sheet rock dust into the carpet even further as he walked on the fallen bits of chalk.  Before long there was a gaping hole in the wall, more in a circle than the square hole that would be needed to mount the window.  Sheet rock fragments were all over the kitchen table, floor and spilling out into the living area.

About this time Walt’s wife returned home from work.  She took one look at the disaster in the kitchen.  Ray thought that she was either going to cry, have another heart attack or… well, some other kind of attack….  So, Ray thought it would be a good time to go home to see his own wife Barbara.

Ray said his quick goodbye’s and skedaddled through the front door amazed at the sudden destruction of the wall in the kitchen and the new carpet.

Ray decided not to visit Walt for a few days, just to let things “work themselves out”.  Finally when Ray came over for another visit with Walt, when he entered the living room and looked toward the wall in the kitchen, he could see that there was no window mounted in the wall, and the entire wall was back to the way it was before anything had happened.

A little confused, Ray asked Walt, “What happened to the window you were putting in the kitchen?”  Walt explained that when he went to put the window in the wall, he broke the glass, so he decided not to put a window there after all.  So, he asked Jerry Osborn if he would patch the wall up.

I mentioned in the last week’s post that Jerry Osborn was one of Walt’s “Guardian Angels”, see the post:  “When Power Plant Ingenuity Doesn’t Translate“.  He was the one that would clean up after Walt’s experiments.  Walt was always thinking outside the box.

Walt’s wife walked into the living room with a cheerful satisfied look on her face, “How are you doing today Ray?”, she asked, as she sat down on the couch.  Ray thought he knew how the window became broken.

One of Walt’s other ventures had to do with miniature ponies.  Walt had decided that even though he had no experience in the “miniature pony” arena, he had read up about the business on the Internet and decided that just by looking at a picture of a miniature pony on the Internet, he could tell if a pony was a keeper or not.

Much like his purchase of the truck in Chesapeake Bay (see the post:  “Mr. Frog’s Wild Power Plant Ride“), Walt decided to buy some miniature ponies from someone in Louisiana, sight unseen.  Before long, Walt owned some miniature ponies, and was in business.

Ray knew Walt really was in the miniature pony business the day he walked into Walt’s house and there in the middle of the floor in the living room were two large wooden boxes, that looked like two coffins.  Can you guess what was in them?

Walt couldn’t wait to show Ray his new batch of pool cues.  He pulled one out of the box, and there written on the side it said, “Walt’s Miniature Ponies, Why buy from someone else when Walt can cheat you just the same.”  Walt explained, “You know Ray… Everyone shoots pool and drinks beer… well, except for you.”

Rest in Peace Walt, and thanks for the great adventures!  The Power Plant Men of North Central Oklahoma wouldn’t have known what to do without you!

Revised 12/27/2025

Originally posted on 12/05/2015

There are various reasons why “outsiders” might look at Power Plant Men with a certain degree of uncertainly.  It could be because their worn jeans are permanently stained with coal dust.  It could be that they use a language that only seasoned mechanics, operators and welders understand.  I think that the main reason that Power Plant Men remain a mystery to many outsiders is because their Power Plant Ingenuity doesn’t always translate into viable solutions outside the plant grounds.

This is best illustrated by sharing another in a series of “Walt Oswalt Stories”.  I may be able to squeeze two Walt stories into one.  If you haven’t read the earlier Walt Oswalt Stories, then maybe you should take a break first and read these two posts: “Mr. Frog’s Wild Power Plant Ride” and “Power Plant Trip Leads to a Game of Frogger“.   Now let’s see how this story goes….

Before I share more of the life and times of Walt Oswalt, let me just preface the story with a few factors that influence the lives of Power Plant Men at the plant, that lead to occasional confusion when they move beyond the Power Plant Boundary.

I suppose that most Power Plant Ingenuity springs from the need to perform tasks that others would consider impossible.  In order to perform these feats of magic, Power Plant Men develop a 7th sense where they have a canny ability to think outside the box.

I can’t say for sure when I first came face-to-face with this type of thinking, but it was probably the first day I ever worked with a Power Plant Man side-by-side.  Various people with completely different backgrounds were hired to work on thousands of pieces of equipment that were each designed by people with incredible imaginations.  In order to fix, repair or operate some of this equipment, the most obvious solution was usually not the best solution to be found.

Let me give you a for-instance…

When I relayed the story about when there was a large explosion just below the Turbine Generator that was followed with an oil fire hot enough to melt the roof off of the building, (see the post:  “Destruction of a Power Plant God“), the shaft on the Main Power Generator was going to be warped because the turning gear was not able to run, mainly because all the cables feeding everything no longer existed…

If the generator warped, it would have cost the Electric Company (or their Insurance Company) a lot of money to replace as well as months of lost revenue.  In order to save the generator, Charles Patten thought of using cans of STP Oil Treatment to lubricate the bearings while manually rotating the turning gear.

As Operators and Charles and some other brave souls worked throughout the night to turn the generator by hand, the fire department fought the fire that was only a few feet away.

Such bravery and ingenuity can not be celebrated enough.  The life time salaries of Charles’ entire crew wouldn’t have amounted to as much cost as Charles Patten saved the company through that one act of bravery.  The only reason we came to know about this was because someone passed it up the line to someone who cared enough to share it with others.  Usually great feats of magic goes on every day, just not on such a grand scale.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is because after years of service at a Power Plant, the Men and Women become so accustomed to doing the impossible, that the word “impossible” is usually not in their vocabulary.  In other words…. “Everything has a Solution.  That seems to be the Power Plant Motto…. and management might add… “Everything has a Safe Solution”.

The problem is that “Power Plant Solutions” don’t always translate into the world beyond the Power Plant.  I don’t mean that Charles Patten went home and tried STP Oil Treatment when he washed his dog…. remember… this is a story about Walt Oswalt.

Walt Oswalt had worked many years at the Power Plant in Mustang, Oklahoma before being offered a job at the new Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma by Orville Ferguson.  Orville had asked Walt to move north to work at the new Power Plant because he knew that whatever task you gave to Walt, he would figure out how to “get-‘er-done”.

As with many Power Plant Men at the plant, when Walt went home in the evening, it wasn’t to go lay back in a chair and drink a beer.  Not right away anyway.  First he had to do some farming…. After all, even though a Power Plant Man’s salary paid the bills, making a little extra never hurt anyone… or so it was thought anyway.

It turned out that Walt had a new barn put on his land that was the admiration of his neighbors.  A nice shiny new metal barn… this is not a picture of the actual barn… This is just a metal barn I found on Google images to illustrate my point:

As you know from my previous posts (if you read them…) that one of Ray Eberle’s best friends was Walt Oswalt.  So, Ray would go over to visit him often since he lived just down the road.  On one particular day when Ray came by for a visit he found Walt loading square bales of hay in his shiny new barn.

Now, be careful… or you might learn something….  Ray noticed right away that Walt was laying the bottom layer of hay flat as shown in the picture above.  This might not seem like such a bad thing to an amateur like me or you, so let me explain…..  The floor of the barn was dirt.

So, as tactfully as Ray could muster the words, he asked Walt… “Don’t you want to set the bottom bales of hay on edge so the wires don’t rust from the moisture that comes up through the ground?”  — You see… the bale of hay is held together by two or three metal wires going around the bale.

Ray was concerned that the wires would rust and then the bottom bales would fall apart when it came time to move them later in the winter when they were needed.  If you just rotated the bale onto it’s side, then the wires would go around the bale instead of under and over the bale.  This was common practice in a world of which I am totally unfamiliar… – but learned when Ray Eberle was telling me this story.

Walt Oswalt replied with one of his most favorite phrases:  “I have that all figured out.”  He explained why he wasn’t worried about the wires rusting with this explanation….  Now put on your thinking cap and see if you can follow along with this logic…

This is Walt’s explanation:  “You see… I happen to know that salt absorbs moisture, so before I put the bales of hay in the barn, I covered the entire floor with salt.  That way the salt will absorb all the moisture and the wires won’t get wet.”

I know how Walt could come up with such a fantastic idea as this… after all, he had come up with some doozies at work in order to do the impossible, so why not think outside the box (or the barn in this case) to come up with a solution just so that you can lay your bottom bales of hay wire-side down… (why?  I suppose just to prove that it could be done).

Maybe he had an argument about this at a bar one day and decided to prove that you don’t “always” have to put the bottom layer on their side… because if you think about it, it’s just as easy to lay them on their side as it is flat.  I know that salt is cheap, but gee whiz… sprinkling salt all over the floor of your brand new shiny metal barn in order to lay the bottom row of hay bales flat…. I’m just not seeing it… but then… I’m not Walt.

Within two months, Ray went to visit Walt and his shiny new barn only to find that the walls of Walt’s new barn now looked like this:

The bottom of the barn had rusted completely away around the entire barn.  Walt’s neighbors were no longer envious of Walt’s new barn.  In fact, I think some non-power plant neighbors were probably even unsympathetic to Walt’s circumstance.  Some were planting trees along his property line, so they didn’t have to see the barn from their back porch.

I guess Walt didn’t consider the other feature that salt displayed…. That salt corrodes metal… Especially when wet… The entire bottom layer of hay in the barn was useless.  The wires had all corroded away and it was a mess.  Ray really felt bad for his friend.  What could Ray do, but show his support for Walt.

Fast forward another couple of months…. Ray Eberle drops by Walt Oswalt’s house for a visit again only to find that the rusted-out barn now looks completely new again….  “What Happened?”  Walt explained that Jerry Osborn came over and fixed the barn….  I suppose it’s time to introduce another one of the “True Power Plant Men” of his day… Jerry Osborn.

As with many true power plant men, Jerry Osborn could fix just about anything he ever laid his hands on.  Sometimes that was all he had to do… Lay his hands on it and nod a little and the pump would start running again…. sometimes it was so eerie it even startled Jerry.  Jerry Osborn had a way of nodding his head much like Jerry Mitchell, only a somewhat younger version.

Whenever Walt backed himself into a corner, all he had to do was call up Jerry and he would show up and patch things up.  Jerry was sort of like Walt’s Guardian Angel.  Jerry was a master carpenter, sheet rocker, mechanic, and observer of mankind.

Though some people thought Jerry was lazy on the job, because he kept himself clean like Jerry Mitchell used to do (see the post:  “A Power Plant Man Becomes an Unlikely Saint“), the truth was that when it came to helping your neighbor, Jerry would always come through.

Ray was standing there admiring the shiny new barn when he noticed that Walt was pacing off some squares in the barn, so he asked him what he was doing…

Walt said, “Oh.  I’m going to turn the barn into a stable.  I’m just pacing off how I am going to place the stalls.  Ray watched for a few minutes as Walt walked back and forth in the barn…. Ray noticed that Walt wasn’t writing anything down so he asked, “Aren’t you going to write this down so you can remember it?”

Walt replied, “Nope.  I have it all right here,” pointing to the side of his head – or maybe he was just clearing the earwax out of his ears.  “I’ll remember it.”  Ray was becoming a little concerned, because he knew that Walt wasn’t the best with figures, and he also wasn’t the best with using a saw, or a hammer and he especially wasn’t the best at building a barn full of stalls…. Ray began to wonder when Walt would find time to build stalls between his weekly heart-attacks.

Ray thought he was going to find a total mess when Walt called him a few weeks later to come by and look at the new stalls in his barn.  When Ray walked in the barn, he was totally amazed.  The stalls looked like they were done by a professional stall installing service (if there is such a thing).  Ray told Walt that he was really impressed that Walt had built such terrific stalls.

Walt explained that all he had to do was tell Jerry Osborn what he wanted and Jerry built the stalls!  How is that for service?

I know this is a small picture, but let me show it to you again….

This story began as just another Walt Oswalt Story, but as usual with Walt, there is always something else that pops up when talking about Walt.  The first Walt Oswalt story I wrote shortly after Walt had died.  When I went to write the second Walt Oswalt Story, I found out that Vance Shiever (the husband of Linda Shiever the Plant timekeeper) had died that very week (only a year earlier).

I didn’t have a picture of Jerry Osborn, so, I Googled Jerry and found that he had died on February 27, 2014.  This is the picture on the memorial site for Jerry.  It seems that the Power Plant Party is growing in heaven faster than I imagined.

Let me tell you a little more about Jerry, since I have not mentioned him in many posts so far…

As you can tell by the way Jerry was taking care of Walt, he was a considerate man.  I never had much to say about Jerry because Jerry never spent much time talking about himself… as a matter of fact, Jerry didn’t spend much time talking at all.

When Jerry was a foreman, he would stand guard over his crew in a silent vigil watching them work.  This bothered some of those that worked for him, because they thought that he was “bird-dogging” them while others thought that he should be pitching in and giving them a hand.

I had another take on Jerry.  When I watched Jerry watching his crew, I had the feeling that he was looking out for them some way.  Sort of “praying” for their safety in some way.  I also saw a look of admiration as he watched his crew at work.  I mentioned above that I looked at Jerry as Walt’s Guardian Angel.  I think he was doing the same thing with his crew.

As I said, Jerry wasn’t much for words.  When he spoke, it was because he had something to say.  He was the type of Power Plant Man that I knew so well…  The type that leaves a first “Bad Impression” (see the post: “Power Plant Art of Making a Bad First Impression“).  I could see right through that facade.  Jerry wasn’t the grumpy old fart he wanted you to think he was.  He was the one looking out for your back.

Rest In Peace Jerry, and now that Walt has joined you, take care of him up there, and try to keep him out of trouble…. you know how Walt is “worth his salt!”

Revised 12/21/2025

Originally posted November 28, 2015

I suppose most people remember where they were New Year’s Eve at midnight on Saturday, January 1, 2000 (That is if you had been born a few years before that).  That is a night I will never forget.  Some people were hiding in self-made bunkers waiting for the end of the world which didn’t happen, others were celebrating at home with their families and friends.  I suppose some people went on with their lives as if nothing was different that night.  Not my family.  My wife and two children spent the night at the Power Plant waiting to see if all of the testing we had performed the last two years had covered all possible failures of the Y2K scare.

A small group of Power Plant Men had been chosen to attend a party with our families in the main conference room at the Power Plant.  All the food and drinks were supplied by the company.  Our Plant Manager, Bill Green was there.  Children were given the opportunity to rest in the smaller conference room as it reached their bedtimes.

Two years before this fateful night, the company was in full swing preparing for the Y2K computer disaster that had been foretold by those who knew that many computer systems only used two digits for the year instead of all four.  so, when the year 2000 rolled around, it would suddenly show up in the computer as 00, which didn’t compute as a year in some systems. After all, you can’t divide something by 00.  Suddenly, the time between events that just happened before midnight and those that happen just after midnight are 100 years apart in the wrong direction.

The coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma was completed in 1979 and 1980, so, my first thought was that by that time, computers were far enough along to know better.  The Instrument and Controls Power Plant Men along with the Plant Engineers decided that the best way to check their systems was to change the clocks on the computers one at a time to just before midnight on New Year’s Eve and see what happens.

I thought that was a pretty ingenious way to go about testing the computer systems.  By changing the clock on each system one at a time to New Year’s Eve and watching it roll over to the new Millennium, you learn right away if you have a problem, and you have contained the disaster to one system at a time while you test it.  By doing this, it turned out that there was a problem with one system at the Co-Generation plant at the Continental Oil Refinery 20 miles north of the plant.

I wrote a post about the Co-Generation Plant in a previous post: “What Coal-fired Power Plant Electricians Are Doing at an Oil Refinery“.  When it was discovered that the computer at the Conoco Oil Refinery Power Plant would crash on New Year’s Eve, it was decided that we would just roll the clock back to 1950 (or so), and we wouldn’t have to worry about it for another 50 years.  The thought was that by that time, this computer would be replaced.

This was the original thought which caused the Y2K problem in the first place.  No one thought in the 1960’s that their computer systems would still be operating when the year 2000 came around, so they didn’t bother to use four digits for the year.  Disk space was expensive at that time, and anything that could save a few bytes was considered an improvement instead of a bug.  Well, there’s only 50 years left as of this last revision (2025).

My wife wasn’t too pleased when I told her where we were going to spend New Year’s Eve when Y2K rolled around, but then again, where would you rather be if a worldwide disaster happened and the electricity shutdown across the country?  I would think the Power Plant would be the best place.  You could at least say, “I was in the actual Control Room at a Power Plant watching them throw the switch and light up Oklahoma City!”  Besides, we usually spent New Year’s Eve quietly at home with our kids.

Even though we were fairly certain everything had been accounted for, it was the unknown computer system sitting out there that no one had thought about that might shut everything down.  Some system in a relay house in a substation, or some terrorist attack.  So, there we sat watching the New Year roll in on a big screen TV at one end of the break room.  Children’s movies were being shown most of the evening to keep the young occupied while we waited.

I thought that Jim Arnold, the Supervisor over the Maintenance Department, wanted me in the break room at the Power Plant so that he could keep an eye on me to make sure I wasn’t going to be causing trouble that night.  Jim never really trusted me….  I suppose that was because strange things would happen when I was around.  Of course, I would never do anything that would jeopardize the operation of the Power Plant, but that didn’t stop me from keeping Jim guessing.

No.  Not really.  I was there because I had a way with computers.  I was the computer go to person at the plant, and if anything happened to any of them, I would probably be the person that could whisper it back into service.  Also, if for some reason the Generators tripped, I was a switchman that could open and close switches in the substation and start the precipitator back up and run up to the top of the boiler if the boiler elevator broke down and get it started back up.

Except for my natural affinity for computers, any of the electricians in the Power Plant could do all those other things.  I think there was just a little “prejudice” left over about me from when Bill Bennett our past A foreman used to say, “Let Kevin do it.  He doesn’t mind getting dirty”  (or…. he likes to climb the boiler, or…. he likes confined spaces, or… Kevin likes to stay up at all hours of the night working on things… I could go on… that was Bill’s response when someone asked him who should do the really grimy jobs  — of course… to some degree…. he was usually right).

I was actually a little proud to be told that I was going to have to spend New Year’s Eve at the Power Plant.  I had almost 17 years of experience as a Power Plant Electrician at that time, and I felt very comfortable working on any piece of equipment in the plant.  If it was something I had never worked on before, then I would quickly learn how it worked… As I said, all the electricians in the plant were the same way.  It was our way of life.

At 11:00 pm Central Time, we watched as the ball dropped in Time Square in New York City.  The 10 or so Power Plant Men with their families sat in anticipation waiting…. and waiting… to see if the lights went out in New York….  Of course, you know now that nothing happened, but we were ready to jump into a crisis mode if there were any reports of power failures across the country.

You see…. The electric grid on the east side of the Rocky Mountains is all connected together.  If the power grid were to go down in one area, it could try dragging down the rest of the country.  If protective relays in substations across the country don’t operate flawlessly, then a blackout occurs in a larger area than just one particular area covered by one electric company.

When relays operate properly, a blackout is contained in the smallest area possible.  There was only one problem…. Breakers in substations are now controlled by remote computer systems.  If those systems began to act erratic, then the country could have a problem.  This did not happen that night.

There was a contract worker in the engineering department at our plant who was at his home in the country during this time hunkered down in a bunker waiting for the end of the world as was foretold by the minister of his church.  He had purchased a large supply of food and water and had piled them up in his shelter along with a portable generator.  He and his family waited out the end of the world that night waiting for the rapture.  He told me about that a few months later.  He was rather disappointed that the world hadn’t ended like it was supposed to.  He was so prepared for it.

After 11 pm rolled around and there was no disaster on the east coast, things lightened up a bit.  I decided to take my son and daughter on a night tour of the plant.  So, we walked over to the control room where they could look at the control panels with all of the lights and alarms.  Here is a picture of Jim Cave and Allen Moore standing in front of the Unit 1 Control Panel:

Then I took each of them up to the top of the Boiler where you could look out over the lake at night from a view 250 feet high.  The Power Plant becomes a magical world at night, with the rumbling sounds from the boiler, the quiet hissing of steam muffled by the night.  The lights shining through the metal structure and open grating floors.

From the top of the boiler, you could look south and see the night lights from Stillwater, Pawnee and Perry.  Looking north, you could see Ponca City and the Oil Refinery at Conoco (later Phillips).  The only structure taller than the boilers are the smokestacks.  There was always a special quality about the plant at night that is hard to put your finger on.  A sort of silence in a world of noise.  It is like a large ship on the ocean.  In a world of its own.

We returned to the break room 20 minutes before midnight, where our plant manager Bill Green and Jim Arnold tested their radios with the Control Room to make sure, we were all in contact with each other.  I had carried my tool bucket up to the break room in case I needed to dash off somewhere in a hurry.

We felt confident by this time that a disaster was not going to happen when the clock rolled over to midnight.  When the countdown happened, and the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 counted down, we cheered “Happy New Year!” and hugged one another.  I think both of my children had dozed off by this point.

Bill Green called the control room.  The word came back that everything was business as usual.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  We waited around another hour just to make sure that nothing had shutdown.  By 1:00 am on January 1, 2000, Bill Green gave us the (Bill) Green Light.  We were all free to return to our homes.

I gathered up my two children and my wife Kelly, and we drove the 25 miles back home to the comfort of our own beds.  When we went to bed early that morning after I had climbed into bed, I reached over and turned off the light on my nightstand.  When the light went out, it was because I had decided to turn it off.  Not because the world had suddenly come to an end.  A new Millennium had just begun.

Revised 12/13/2025

Originally posted November 21, 2015

Sometimes when something is written on paper, it becomes carved in stone (I should copyright that phrase — oh.  as soon as I click “Publish” I will).  I saw a flaw in Power Plant logic one day in November 1994.  Corporate Headquarters for the Electric Company in Oklahoma had decided that they needed very clear job descriptions for their Job Announcement program.

We had just completed a downsizing a few months earlier and two electricians were asked to determine what prerequisites someone would need to be able to do their jobs.  My first thought was… “Is that really a smart way to go about this?”  Just think about it….  You are asking someone who just survived a downsizing to determine what it would take to replace that person with someone else…. Can you see the flaw in this logic?

It was decided that in order to be hired as an electrician, you had to have the following prerequisites:   A technical degree in an electrical field.  A minimum of five years experience as an industrial electrician.  Have a technical knowledge of how to walk on water.  Able to swing from tall buildings using four size 2 conductor cables.  Have extensive experience bending conduit.  Able to work in confined space manholes.  Can bend a one inch diameter stainless steel rod with bare hands.  Black Belt in Six Sigma.  Able to explain the meaning of each color on a resistor.  Not afraid of heights.  Willing to shovel coal. — Yep.  that’s what it requires to do my job.

I knew right away this wasn’t going to be good.  We would never find someone who can both walk on water and was willing to shovel coal.  If we ever had to replace an electrician, it would be darn near impossible.

This wasn’t only true for electricians.  Every type of job in the company was given similar treatment.  I had been an electrician for 11 years at that point, and I didn’t even meet the minimum qualifications to be hired as an electrician.  If I had left the company and tried to apply for a job at our plant as an electrician, I would have been turned away at the door.

Whatever minimum requirements were written down did not only apply to outside applicants.  This was required of employees applying through the internal Career Announcement Program (CAP) as well.  In other words, I never would have been able to join the electric shop from the Labor Crew as I did in 1983, with only a scant understanding of what it takes to be an electrician.

It wasn’t until a few years later that this occurred to anyone.  The minimum requirements were relaxed a little.  That was when the training program was put in place to take High School graduates and above and allow them to train at the plant for a particular skill as I described in the post:  “Power Plant Train Wreck“.  The rest of the company had to live with their own minimum requirements.

The results of asking the employees what the minimum requirements should be for their own jobs, HR had painted themselves into a corner.  I knew why they did this.  It was because they had lawsuits in the past where someone was hired over someone else, and they thought they were more qualified for the job and they claimed they were victims of discrimination.  So, specific requirements for each job needed to be created…. Actually…. I think this is the opposite of what should have been done.

If I had my druthers, I would have approached this from the opposite direction… let me continue with my story and you will see why.

I started getting my degree in Management Information Systems (MIS) in 1997 at Oklahoma State University.  I was going to graduate from the business school in May 2001.  In the fall of 2000, I had only 6 credit hours (or two more classes) left.  I had started in 1999 applying for IT jobs in our company.  Many times I was asked by people in the IT department to apply for specific job openings.  I had worked with a lot of them, and they would have liked for me to work for them.  I suppose they didn’t realize how rotten I was. — Or maybe they did.

Unfortunately, at that time, here was the minimum requirements for a Software Developer:  You had to have one or more of the following:  A bachelor’s degree in computer science… OR bachelor’s degree in MIS with at least 9 hours of computer languages (I had the 9 hours of computer languages) … OR bachelor’s degree in a business or technically related field with 18 hours of computer science courses including 9 hours of computer languages…. OR Associate Degree in Computer Science with 9 hours of computer languages and 2 years of software development experience…. OR 8 years of directly related experience such as development in C, C++, ABAP, Visual Basic or Cobol.

It was that last requirement that I thought I could use.  Especially since I was well on my way to earning the degree.  I had many years writing code in Visual Basic and C.  I had taken a Cobol class already, and studied ABAP (which is used in SAP) on my own.  So, along with almost having my degree and working with IT for more than 8 years, I applied for these jobs.

Every time I did, HR would kick the application back to me and explain that I didn’t meet the minimum requirements so I was not able to be considered for the position.  Not until I had my degree in my hands.  The HR Director said that all the work I had done with IT didn’t count because I was doing it as an electrician.  She said her hands were tied.

In November 2000 the University had a career fair for students applying for IT or business careers.  So, I attended it.  It was in a large room where each of the companies had setup a booth and you walked around to each booth as the various companies explained why it would be nice to go work for their company.  They explained their benefits, and when they were done, they asked you for your resume (pronounced “rez U May” in case you’re wondering) if you were interested.

Before the career fair, I had gone to lectures on how to go through the interview process, and I had read books about how to create a good resume.  I had bought books on these subjects and read them after having gone to a lecture by the author Martin Yate.  Here are three books that were useful in my job hunt:

So, here I was at a job fair dressed in a nice suit I had bought in Oklahoma City at a high-end Suit store.  I had studied what color shoes, belt and tie to wear.  I had a stack of my carefully designed resumes in hand.  My wife Kelly had given me a professional haircut the night before, and I had even washed behind my ears and flossed my teeth.

I had quickly changed into my suit in the bathroom in the office area at the Power Plant.  I quickly took the elevator down to the ground floor and stole out to the parking lot to drive the 30 miles to the Job Fair.  No one saw me leave, except Denise Anson, the receptionist.

I made my way around each aisle of booths, carefully considering each company.  I was not really interested in working as a consultant where I had to do a lot of travelling.  After all, I had a family.  I gave my resume to many companies that day, and later I had interviews with many of them.  It felt very strange as a 40 year old acting as a kid in school handing resumes to companies.  I really just wanted to stay at the Electric Company where I had worked for the past 19 years.

Then I spied the booth I was really curious to visit.  It was the Electric Companies booth.  The company where I worked.  I saw a group of students walk up to the booth and the young man from HR began his speech about why it would be great to work for the Electric Company.  I stood toward the back of the small crowd and listened.  It was weird hearing him tell us about the benefits of working for the company.

The Director of HR was standing next to him.  I believe her name was Sandy Claypool, as you can see in the Job Announcement above.  She was the person that kept rejecting all of my job applications through the internal job announcement program.  I waited patiently thinking… I could come up with better reasons for working for the best Electric Company in the world.  He never mentioned once that the best employees you would ever find in the entire world worked just 30 miles north on Hwy 177 at the big Power Plant on the hill.  That would have been the first thing I would have mentioned.

I waited until the young man completed his speech and then asked the students if they would like to give him their resumes.  I stood there, not moving, but smiling at the young man from HR.  After everyone else left, the man turned to me and awkwardly asked me if I would like to give him my resume (it was awkward because I was just standing there watching him).  I replied as I handed him my resume by saying, “I’ll give you my resume, but I don’t think you can hire me.”

He replied, “Sure we can.” as he glanced down at my resume.  I continued, “See… I already work for the company.”  The young man brightened up and said, “I thought I recognized you!  You work at the Power Plant just north of here!”  I said, “Yeah.  You were the leader at my table during the Money Matters class.”  “Yeah!  I remember that!” He replied. (See the post:  Power Plant Men Learn How Money Matters).

“Sure, we can hire you!” He replied.  I said, “No.  I don’t think you can.  You see.  I don’t meet the minimum requirements.”  Then I turned my gaze to the Director of HR who was now staring off into space…  The gaping hole in logic had suddenly become very apparent.  She replied very slowly…. “No… I don’t think we can hire you.”  The young man (I think his name is Ben), looked confused, so I explained….

“You see Ben… you can take resumes from all of these college students and offer them a job for when they graduate, but since I already work for the company, I have to have my degree already in my hand before I meet the requirements.  I can go to any other booth in this room and have an interview and be offered a job, but I can’t find an IT job in the company where I work because I don’t meet the minimum requirements.  Seems kind of odd.  Doesn’t it?”

I continued…. “Not only that, but the Electric Company has paid for all my classes to get my degree and 75% of my books.  I have only 6 more hours after December, and I can’t find a job with my own company.  I will probably have to go to another company that is guaranteeing a job when I graduate.  Does that make sense?”

The HR Director was still staring off into space.  She knew as soon as I opened my mouth who I was.  She had personally signed each rejection letter to me.

So, what had happened?  It had happened a few years earlier when the employees were asked what the minimum requirements should be for someone to be hired for their jobs.  That led them down a path of closed doors instead of opening up opportunities.

Here is what I would have done instead… I would have done what other companies do… Minimum Requirements:  “Team Player.  Able to work well with others.  Demonstrated an ability to learn new skills.”  — Who wouldn’t want an employee like that?  Sure.  Add some “Desired attributes” on the end like: Able to bend conduit.  Able to Walk on Water, etc.

I had spent about an hour at the career fair handing my resume to potential employers before I left.  I drove back to the plant.  On the way back to the plant I was having this sinking feeling that I was not going to be able to stay with the Electric Company.  I can’t describe how sad I was at this thought.

I couldn’t just stick around at the plant hoping that once I had a degree in my hands that I would be able to move into the IT department.  For all I knew, our own plant manager could have been telling HR that I couldn’t leave the plant because I was the only person that worked inside the precipitator.  I had been flown around the country to interview with different companies who were now offering me jobs.  Those offers wouldn’t still be there if I waited until I graduated, so I had to make a decision soon.

I knew that the Plant Manager Bill Green kept asking the Supervisor over Maintenance about my degree because Jim Arnold would ask me from time-to-time, “What’s that degree you’re getting again?”  I would say, “Management Information Systems” in the Business College.  Jim would go back to Bill and say, “Oh.  You don’t have to worry about Kevin leaving.  No one wants someone with that degree” (Yeah.  Heard that from someone on the staff that heard it first hand).

When I arrived back at the plant, I walked in the entrance and hurried to the elevator.  I waved at Denise as I quickly walked by the receptionist window and quickly went into the men’s room to change back into my jeans and tee-shirt and work boots.  No one else saw me.  I returned to work with Ray Eberle in the Print Room to work on SAP.  Ray asked me how it went…

I told Ray about my adventure and my encounter at the Electric Company booth.  Ray came to the same realization that I had on the way back to the plant… I wasn’t going to be able to stay with the company.  I was going to have to move on…

Revised 12/6/2025

Originally posted November 14, 2015

Whenever I walked into the Control Room at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma and saw Jim Cave manning the helm, I couldn’t help but smile.  I would do the same thing when Gene Day was standing there, but for a different reason.  Jim just seemed to make everyone feel at ease.  There is something special about his personality that rubs everyone the right way.

Jim worked for the company the first summer in 1979 when I was working as a summer help in the maintenance shop.  I really didn’t know him until he became a control room operator and I was in the electric shop.  He was always one of the brighter bulbs in the box.

When I first met Jim Cave, the first thing that came to mind was that he reminds me of a News reporter.  He looks like someone that you would think would be telling you the daily news on TV.  He has that likable face that you would trust to tell you the news each day.  Everyone wanted to have their picture taken with Jim because he automatically brightened up the photograph.  Thanks to Jim’s Facebook page, I have some pictures to show you.

Actually, I think all of the pictures of operators that I have used in my posts over the years have come from Jim Cave’s Facebook photos.  You can see from the picture above that Jim Cave seems to stand out as someone who might be a reporter on the nightly news.

Before I tell you about how Jim Cave has his own story pertaining to the Life of Pi, let me show you a couple of more photos of Operators who couldn’t resist posing with Jim Cave:

You can see that no matter the situation, Jim is always smiling.  I can’t think of any time that I saw Jim that he wasn’t smiling a genuine smile.

Now that I have embarrassed Gene Day by showing him wearing short shorts (which was the full intent of this entire post.  The rest about Jim Cave is just to put it in some sort of context), I will begin the actual story…

A new computer was installed one day that was called a VAX system. Instead of being a large mainframe computer in cabinets, this one sat out in the middle of the floor.

One more thing before I talk about Jim Cave and the Life of Pi.  In 2012, there was a movie about a boy from India that was shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean and was trapped on a lifeboat with a Tiger.

The story about Jim Cave and the Life of Pi has nothing to do with being shipwrecked or being on a lifeboat.  It doesn’t even have anything to do with a tiger.

The VAX computer allowed the control room to monitor readings from most of the power plant systems right there on a computer monitor.  This was a new thing at the time.  A few years after it was installed, a new program was installed on a computer on the counter behind the Control Room operator’s desk.  The software was called PI.

As a side note:  This software was being used by Koch Industry to control oil pipelines across the country.  I’ll tell you how I know below.

When a program like this is first installed, it isn’t of much use.  The reason is that in order to monitor everything, the screens have to be setup.  You can see by the screenshots above that each graph, icon and connecting line has to be defined and setup in order to show you a full picture of what is happening.

If a lot of effort is put into building the screens, then this application not only becomes a great benefit to the control room operators, it also benefits the entire operation of the plant.

We had the same situation with SAP.  We had installed SAP in 1997 at the Electric Company, but the real benefit comes when an effort is made up front to put in all the expert data to make it useful.  While Ray Eberle and I were working to put the expert data into SAP, this new PI system was installed in the Control Room.  In order to make it useful, screens needed to be built.

Notice the alarm panels are still there in the picture in 2005.

Some operators weren’t too keen on the computer since they had been staring at these alarm panels all their adult life, and they were just in tune with the power plant as they could be.  Paper recorders, gauges that you might have to tap every now and then to take an accurate reading… colored red, yellow, blue and red lights.  Red Level gauges, Counters, Knobs to turn, Switches to toggle.  Buttons to push.  All of these things gave the operator a physical connection to the power plant system.  Who needs a computer?

Jim Cave saw the benefit right away.  He took out the Pi Manual and began reading it.  He learned how to create new screens and add components.  Then he began the work of giving “Life to Pi”.

Each time Jim added a new system to Pi, the operators saw the benefit of using this tool more and more (like Allen Moore, shown above).

In 2000, Jim Cave had built a complete set of screens, releasing the Power of PI upon the Control Room Operators making their jobs easier and giving them much more insight into the operation of the plant that they never would have dreamed 5 years earlier.  (except for Bill Rivers who had predicted this day 17 years earlier when no one would believe him).

Jim Cave’s Shift Supervisor, Gary Wright wanted to recognize Jim Cave for the tremendous effort he put forth to build the PI system into every Power Plant Operator’s dream.  So, he went to Bill Green the Plant Manager and told him that he would like to do something special for Jim to recognize all the effort he put into the Pi system.

Bill replied to Gary by asking if Jim did this while he was on the job, or did he come in during his own time to work on it.  Gary replied that Jim had done this while still performing his job of Control Room operator through his own initiative.  It wasn’t part of his regular job.  Bill clarified, “But this work was done while Jim was on the clock?” “Yes”, Gary answered.  “Then Jim was just doing his job”, Bill replied.

At this same time, I was having a conflict of my own that I was trying to work through.  I will go into more detail in a later post, but here it is in a nutshell….

I had been going to the university to get a degree called “Management Information Systems” or MIS from the business college at Oklahoma State University.  I had been applying for jobs in the IT department in our company, but for reasons I will discuss later, I was not allowed to move to the IT department, even when I had only one semester left before graduating with the degree. (See the post:  Crack in Power Plant Armor Leads to Gaping Hole in Logic)

My problem was that I was being offered jobs from various companies when I graduated in May.  Boeing in Wichita even gave me a job offer and wanted me to leave school and to work for them on the spot for having a computer and an electrical background to work on military jets, (which sounded real cool).  The electric company had been paying 100% of my tuition and fees and 75% of the cost of the books.  So, my education had been paid by the company.  I told Boeing that above all, I wanted to finish my degree before I began my career in IT.

I felt as if I owed the electric company my allegiance and that I would stay with them, and that is why I kept applying for jobs within the company.  I felt that way until the day I heard this story about Gary Wright trying to recognize Jim Cave for his extra effort.

When I heard Bill Green’s response was, “He was just doing his job…”, it suddenly hit me….  The company paying for my tuition was one of my benefits.  I didn’t owe the company anything in return for that.  I had already given them what was due.  I had been their employee and had done my job.  I no longer felt the need to “pay back” the company by staying.  I had already paid them with my service.  I actually remember saying that out loud to Ray Eberle.  “The company paying for my education is my benefit.”

This was a turning point in my job search.  I felt perfectly free after that to accept a job from another company.  Bill’s response to Gary Wright had opened my eyes.  I felt perfectly at ease accepting the job offer from Dell the following month.  It’s too bad that it took snubbing Jim Cave’s extraordinary effort by the plant manager to put my understanding of my situation in the proper light.

During that time, I had a job offer that I had turned down from Koch Industry in Wichita because they didn’t offer me as much pay as some of the other job offers I had received.  A month later they called me back and asked me to go for another interview in a different department.

When I showed up for the interview, it was with the SCADA department.  SCADA stands for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition.  That is what the electric company called the system that opens and closes breakers remotely.  Koch Industries uses the same type of system to control the pipelines across the country from their one location in Wichita.

After the interview, they showed me around the office.  When we walked into the lab, one person showed me the computer system they were using to control all the pipelines, and lo and behold…. it was the PI system.  The same one that Jim Cave had learned in the control room at our Power Plant.  They offered me a job in that department as well for a little more.

I thought to myself that if I accepted the job with Koch, then I would ask Jim to teach me what he had learned about the Pi software.  This would come in real handy.  It turned out that the offer from Dell was even better than Koch, which was my second choice if I hadn’t accepted the job at Dell.

Things have changed at the plant since the picture in 2005.  I believe it was in 2006 that the alarm panels were removed from the control room and everything was put on the computers.  The control room operators no longer have to stand in front of panels of lights and gauges and knobs and buttons and switches.  It is all viewed on computer screens.

Here is a picture of Jim sitting in front of some of those computer screens…

I see eleven computer monitors on the counter behind the old control panel and we can’t even see the other half of the counter.  It looks like Jim built so many screens they just kept having to add more and more monitors to show them all. — Oh.  I suspect that Jim didn’t create all these screens, but he did help acclimate the Control Room operators to using computers so that when the evolution to a completely computerized system did arrive, they were ready for it.

Great work Jim Cave!  Thank you for all you have done for the Electric Company in Oklahoma.  You have made a lasting difference that will carry forward to the next generation of Control Room Operators.  I don’t just mean by giving Life to PI.  Your positive attitude in times of stress to the times of boredom have blessed everyone that ever knew you.

I for one am grateful to have met and worked with a True Power Plant Man such as yourself.