When Weightlifters Become Leader of the Pack at Dell
I never went out of my way to lift weights, unless it was something like a paperweight. I usually pulled my own weight, and I would only lift the elevator counterweight by using the elevator controls while standing on top of the elevator. Some people may have referred to me as a dumbbell, but I don’t think anyone would ever have confused me with a weightlifter. Which suited me fine, since I never was one.
One morning when I was being transferred from the Finance Team back to IT, I was sitting in meeting room with my manager, Doug Boswell. He had asked me a question a few weeks earlier. He wondered if all I ever did was IT stuff. I told him, “Pretty much”. So, he said he was going to transfer Stephen Todd and me back to IT where we belonged.
Stephen Todd – Is that Texas BBQ?
That’s why I was sitting in this meeting room. We were meeting with the person that was going to be our new manager. Stephen couldn’t be there. I think he was eating BBQ with some co-workers (see picture above). We were meeting in the big meeting room in the payroll area. I believe that Lindsey Dudik was there. I remember meeting in that same meeting room about 6 months earlier when we were moving onto the Finance team from Employee Services, as there was a big reorganization (like that never happened. Actually, every 6 months to a year, we would reorganize).
Lindsey was in that first meeting where we were being introduced to our new Manager Doug Boswell. She was a young lady, 23 years old. I could tell right away that Lindsey was really the one in charge of our new team. It seemed as if Doug kept referring to her when there was any questions.
Lindsey Dudik
As you will find out (if you haven’t already), I continued working with Lindsey for the rest of my career at Dell and even at General Motors for a while.
Anyway. After the meeting was over, later in the afternoon, Stephen Todd asked me, “What do you think of our new manager? What’s she like?”
I responded first by stopping to think about “How am I going to put this?” Then I said, “Well, my first impression was that she reminded me of a Viking.”
When Stephen asked me, “in what way?”
I said, “Well, I wouldn’t want to get in an argument with her. She might beat me up.” This was my first impression of Cara Pack.
Cara Pack is the one on the Right
Yeah. You can tell from this picture how I might think that Cara was a Viking, (and I don’t mean a fan of the Minnesota Vikings).
The first time Cara met with Stephen and I as we were transitioning to her team, she said something about making sure we had the proper access to the Timekeeping and Expense Reporting applications because we were moving from the Business into IT.
Well. If you have been reading my previous posts, you would know that Stephen and I already had full access to everything in Finance. From the Oracle Financials application, all the way down to the Warranty application used to set the prices for warranties on every computer configuration a person could possibly make. When we had moved into the business, since Stephen and I were the only two who knew how to work on the Kronos and Concur applications, the Finance IT Support just let us keep access to everything.
So, when Cara said, “We need to make sure you have the proper access.” I looked over at Stephen, who looked back at me (as if he was wondering how I was going to respond, because he already knew how I had been with other managers in the past. — Speaking my mind, I mean. See the post: Tell Dell Survey: If You Don’t Want to Hear the Answer, Don’t Ask the Question). So. Stephen looked at me, looking at him, with Cara glancing at both of us.
I said, “Ok”, purposely looking at Cara as if I had something to hide (this was the look that when I give it to my wife, she says I’m being rotten). Cara looked back and forth at both of us, wondering what I meant by that. I could tell that she was just going to shelve that thought until a later time. Maybe after a few beers.
About a week after Stephen and I joined Cara Pack’s pack (I mean, “team”) our team had an offsite at the bowling alley on I-35 just north of Rundberg. I would give you the address, but that was in December 2008, and the bowling alley is no longer there.
I’m not much of a bowler. I bowl the same way I play horseshoes. If you ask Diana Brien how well I play horseshoes, she will tell you to stand way back when I throw a horseshoe, because there is a chance that the horseshoe will end up somewhere behind me.
My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien
So, instead of throwing bowling balls, Stephen and I sat at a table where we drank a beer (see. I wasn’t just making it up about the beers).
Cara gave everyone on her team a present. She gave Stephen Todd and me a Leatherman tool. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. A Leatherman Multi-tool.
Leatherman Multi-Tool
How neat! A Leatherman! What a great present!
Then after giving us these presents, Cara sat down at our table with Stephen and me and asked us, “The other day when we were talking about your transition to our team, I asked you something, and you both looked at each other as if you had something you weren’t saying. What was that about?”
I smiled and I looked over at Stephen, who had a big grin on his face. It might have been because of the Guiness. Then I looked back at Cara and I told her everything. I told her that IT is concerned about controlling access to everything and following all the procedures. Dell is concerned with paying the employees correctly. Because laws are always changing, and Dell policies change, we have to be able to make changes very quickly. Sometimes we will be told that we have to make a change on Friday that needs to be there on Monday. So, we have to be able to quickly make changes. So, Finance IT, understanding this, let us keep our access to Kronos and Concur so we not only are developers for these applications, but we are also the only Support Team for them.
I thought that there wasn’t any reason to bring up our access to the rest of the Finance applications since we wouldn’t be accessing them anyway.
Cara said that she would just let us do what we thought needed to be done, and as long as everything worked, she understood. We understood each other.
So, why did I name the post: “When Weightlifters Become Leader of the Pack at Dell”? Because Cara Pack actually was a weightlifter! How neat (that’s the second time, I have said, “How neat).
Anyway, I kept the Leatherman tool sitting by the phone in the kitchen for a long time. Every once in a while, my wife, Kelly, would be cleaning the kitchen and quietly move it somewhere else. Maybe she was thinking I wouldn’t notice. I wanted to keep it around, because it reminded me of how I felt when Cara gave it to me. I wanted to make people feel that way.
The following Christmas, in 2009, I bought everyone on our team a mini thumb drive that had multiple Gigs of capacity. I don’t remember how much now, but it was a lot. I had driven over to Fry’s Electronics and bought the 8 or 10 thumb drives, and on some I put some of my music on there. Around that time, Nina Richburg left our team and moved to another building. I loaded most of my music on a thumb drive and gave it to her as a going away present. She told me later after she listened to it in the car once when she was on a trip, that this was the most eclectic collection of music she had ever heard.
Side Note:
When I was in a Marketing Class in Stillwater at Oklahoma State University in 1999, my professor, Dr. Manzer told the auditorium that I was an eclectic. He said, “That means he knows something about everything”. He said that after I kept answering all of his obscure questions. One question I remember is: “What happened in 1975 that changed the dynamics of the restaurants around the campus?” — The answer was that a restaurant was considered a bar if they served more alcohol than they did any other product, like food. If it was a bar, then you had to be 21 to enter. So, Eskimo Joes started selling T-Shirts, which became famous when an Eskimo Joes T-Shirt showed up in the movie “Every Which Way but Loose” in 1978. Then everyone was ordering the T-Shirt around the country.
Dr. Manzer made a deal with me in front of the class. He said, “When I ask a question, don’t raise your hand to answer it. Wait until I give everyone else a chance first, and then I’ll ask you.” Dr. Manzer was the leader of the pack when it came to Marketing. He was not, however, a Weightlifter. A heavy hitter perhaps.
Dr. Lee Manzer, Marketing Professor (Emeritus) at Oklahoma State University.
I love that guy. I only met his wife Saundra once, but he talked about her often in his class. They lived just down the street from my parents, in the same neighborhood where Ron Kilman lived when he was in Stillwater. I was sad to hear that she passed away in 2024.
End of Side Note.
I continued to give out gifts to people or take them out to lunch throughout my career. It made me happy to be reminded about how much I appreciated Cara Pack as my manager. When I rank the managers I had at Dell, (and I had 23 in the 12 1/2 years I was there), Cara Pack is at the top of the list along with Ali Levin.
Ali Levin
Ali, because she did more for my career than any other manager. Cara because she became my closest friend of all the managers I had. Stephen Todd, Cara Pack and I will still occasionally, go out to eat at Chuy’s when we get the chance. We are all retired now, so it’s harder to have us all in town at the same time. But we try. Maybe after they read this post, we will set a date for lunch. Instead of beer, maybe…. Margaritas?
Power Plant Man Stuck with Dell Sticky Persistence
One thing I learned while I was working at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma was that “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” I think my wife calls it “being stubborn.” I seem to remember as a summer help in 1979 when I was helping Jerry Mitchell filter the oil for the dumper car clamp, asking Jerry over and over, “Is this the right size?” After he told me “No.” for the fourth or fifth time, he finally said, “That’s the one.” That’s when I handed him the wrench. Come to think of it. I think I dreamed that part, so, never mind.
If I think long enough, I’ll find a better example of being persistent. Well. At least I will be persistent in my search for persistency.
Ok. Ok. Here’s one. I had to replace a bearing from a motor once where the bearing was all shelled out, so when I put the bearing puller on it and cranked down on it, it just tore the outer shell of the bearing off leaving the inside sleeve of the bearing tightly gripping the shaft, with ‘nary enough lip to get a grip.
Bearing Puller
Being new in the electric shop at the time, I hadn’t obtained the time-honored talent of ingenuity that the other electricians possessed. So, instead of using the bearing separator sitting there inside the shop tool cart, I devised all sorts of inadequate means to pull the sleeve off of the shaft.
Bearing Separator
Here is a great example of a bearing sleeve having sticky persistence. Beating on it. Trying to saw it in two. Spraying it with WD-40. Praying. None of that seemed to move the bearing. That is, until Gene Roget came into the shop (Evidently, someone had told him that I had been praying for his assistance). When Gene came in the shop, I asked him what I could do with this bearing sleeve, pointing at it sitting on the workbench with my bruised and greasy finger with the chewed off fingernails, where I was gnawing on them while trying to come up with a solution, and tasting the WD-40, just out of curiosity.
My new foreman, Charles Foster, had told Gene Roget to teach me how to be a good electrician, since I didn’t know anything when I showed up in the shop on November 7, 1983. Gene Roget was the guy that should have been given the position that was given to me, but since Charles Foster had asked me about 8 months earlier if would consider being an electrician, he fought for me when the position finally opened. Gene was always very nice about training the guy that took the electrician job when he was much more qualified as a contract electrician with many years’ experience.
Anyway. When I showed Gene my dilemma, he opened up the bottom drawer of the large tool cart and pulled out the Bearing Separator shown above. Then he walked me through how to use it.
A Cajun I found on Google Images that slightly resembles Gene Roget. Actually, this is the actor Shia LaBeouf.
There are many stories I could share where Power Plant Men struggled with something for a long time before they finally succeeded. Stories where their “Sticky Persistence” paid off, but this is a story about the first time I heard this phrase when I was working a Dell, so I will proceed toward that story now.
On Monday, January 12, 2004, the new version of our timekeeping application, Kronos “went live”. For all those who are electricians, reading this, when I say, it “went live”, that does not mean that we turned on the electricity. It means that the application became operational in production. I had been working on this since August 2003. Since November, I had been working with the Kronos consultant, Kevin Watson preparing the new system to go live. Like Gene Roget, Kevin Watson was the expert. I was a new developer as far as Kronos was concerned.
Kevin Watson
After Kevin had been working on this project a couple of weeks, he calculated that we should be able to go live sometime in April 2004. I said, “No. We are going live on January 12.”
Kevin replied, “There’s no way we can complete this by January 12.”
This Kevin (meaning me) said, “We will be going live on January 12. The users will either like the application or not. That’s the day we have to go live.” From that point on, Kevin (meaning Watson) and Kevin (meaning me) worked longer days until January 12. We worked over Christmas break. I remember that on December 17, 2003, my wife and kids picked us up at the office to take us straight to the Tinseltown Movie Theater in Pflugerville to watch the movie: Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King.”
Lord of the Rings, Return of the King
Everything was ready on the morning of January 12 to go live when we arrived in the office that morning. We had the link turned on by the network guy working with us (his name escapes me at the moment. I’ll call him Bill). We notified the users that they could start using the application to enter time. We had already turned on the time clocks in the manufacturing plants in the United States so they would talk to the application.
We had a “War Room” set up so that we could respond to issues immediately. Our Project Manager Laura Dronen was there, the business partners, Donna Ford and Michelle Baker were there. Sunanda Pandian, the IT support person was there.
Laura Dronen’s LinkedIn Photo
Michelle Baker
Sunanda Pandian
I don’t have a picture of Donna Ford.
Since Kevin Watson, our Kronos Consultant had worked for a police department in his earlier life, he brought some police barrier tape, and we strung it up across the doors to the meeting room. We taped our Elvis Wand to the door in case of emergency.
Elvis Wand
Every IT department should have an Elvis Wand handy in case of emergencies.
Ok. So. We had the link turned on. We waited.
It didn’t take long before someone called saying that the application was crashing on them. When I logged in, it crashed on me. — Oh No!!! What’s going on? This hadn’t happened in the Development and Test environments!
We had our network guy, Bill (at least that’s the name I’m giving him here until Laura Dronen can contact me and remind me of his name), look at it from his end, because we were getting some strange message about a session not being found. — He couldn’t find anything wrong on his end.
So, Kevin Watson contacted the Kronos experts, and we had him on a conference call in our war room. We told him about the error we were receiving, and he immediately knew what was wrong. He said that we had to have “sticky persistence” on this application. He also explained that because of the way that Kronos used “Sticky Persistence”, we had to have a special card installed on our four servers in order for the application to work. — What? Why is this the first time I’m hearing about this?
Well. Our Development and Test environments only consisted of one server. Now that we had 4 servers, we were using what’s called “Round Robin” to direct the network traffic to each of the servers. This meant that each time a browser called the Kronos application it would end up on the next server. So, it would go “Round Robin”.
So, after quickly learning about Round Robin and Sticky Persistence, we had another bit of information that we had to digest. That was that we needed 4 special cards installed in each of our 4 servers, and each card cost $30,000. This would take time to order, and we wouldn’t be able to physically have this done for about 2 weeks, if we were able to do it at all. After all, this would be a cost of $120,000!!!
Our network guy Bill redirected the traffic so that everyone would log into only one server in order for the application to run at all. This allowed people to use the application, though it was very slow at first, because Kronos used a lot of processing and memory on the server, and we had a lot of users that were entering time for people that had worked over the weekend while we had the application down so that we could prepare to go live on Monday morning. The performance was a little better after the first rush to enter time was over, but it was still a very bad experience for the users.
You can imagine that we were scrambling. We had a conference call with my VP, my manager and the Kronos experts. I remember my VP being very upset and telling Kronos that this was their problem and that we would not be putting a special card in our servers. He kept saying, “You realize we are Dell? You have to make this work!” I imagine the Kronos guys were just as frustrated about it as we were, because, after all. What could they do?
I figured that this was all on me. After all, this was my project. Even though I had never heard of “Sticky Persistence” before that morning, I suppose I should have known enough to test the application running on multiple servers before we went live, and I didn’t.
I figured if Kronos was going to be “My baby” just like the Precipitator was “My baby” (according to Mark Fielder) back at the power plant, then I was going to have to try and fix this problem.
I seem to work better when I’m listening to music, so, I think I tried to pretend that the voice of our VP panicking on the conference call was actually a Heavy Metal song, I searched through the Kronos application looking at the code. I finally found where the JavaScript page was that had the code for clicking on the Logon button. I could see in the code where when the button was clicked, it called the Kronos URL. So, I changed the code so that it would go directly to that particular server. That way when the network sent the next browser to the next server, when the person clicked the logon button, instead of going to the page using the main Kronos URL, it used a URL that had the server’s name instead of the generic Kronos.dell.com name that the network would route to another server. — I know. Sorry for the boring explanation.
One more thing for the techies who may be reading this. The code was actually found inside a .ear file that had a .war file in it, so I had to decompress the code in order to make the change and compress it back into the .ear file after it was changed.
Anyway. I changed the code on the four servers, and I asked Bill, the network guy, to turn the Round Robin back on for the four servers. He quickly did that, and voila! What do you know? It worked!
That meant that the application was instantly working! We didn’t have to wait two or three weeks and spend $120,000 buying special boards to put in the servers. All we had to do was tweak the code a bit.
If any of you are reading this post that are a stickler for procedures, you may be wondering how I could have Bill making changes to the network on the fly, changing the Round Robin back and forth and quickly adding and dropping servers from the DNS server all day. Well. Let me explain how this was done.
When we first talked to Network Bill two months earlier, he was not very cooperative when we would ask him to do something for us. He would go into a long explanation about all the reasons why he did what he did a certain way. When I asked him a question, he would spend 15 minutes answering it. When he was done, I would reply with something like, “So. The answer is ‘Yes?'” or “No?” It was very hard dealing with Joe. Oh. I mean Bill. He would push back on everything we wanted him to do.
Laura, our project manager was very frustrated with Bill, and we were thinking about asking for someone who would be a little more cooperative, so I told Laura, “Hey. Go with me. I’ll show you how to handle this.” So, we walked from the basement of Round Rock 1 where we had been working in the payroll department, over to Round Rock 2 Central to the Dell Store. I walked into the Dell Store and found the most expensive Dell Pen I could find and bought it. I think it was like $25 for that one pen. It was in a nice little box.
Then we walked over to Round Rock 2 East and found Bill’s desk. When we arrived, we introduced ourselves, and I noticed that Bill had an uncomfortable look on his face. I don’t think he was used to talking to the people that he worked with face-to-face. He reminded me of a couple of nerdy programmers on the movie “Wargames”
Melvin from Wargames played by Eddie Deezen
I told Melvin, I mean Bill, that we really appreciated all the work he is doing for us, and so we just wanted to present him with this Dell pen.
That was the ticket. After I gave Bill the pen, he would do anything we asked. This allowed us to quickly pivot when we went live so that the project turned out a big success after the initial scare.
I learned my lesson when I first became an electrician. Sticky Persistence. Stay with it until the problem is solved. I think this was the philosophy of everyone that worked in the maintenance department at the Power Plant. This lesson paid off years later when I was actually faced with something called “Sticky Persistence”.
From Power Plant POs to Dell Expense Reports
During my fourth summer as a summer help at the Power Plant, I was given the coveted job of collecting the mail each morning for the plant. I would drive the plant manager’s pickup truck to Redrock to their little post office. Then I would take a back road south until I came to Highway 64 where I would turn east and head toward Morrison Oklahoma to collect the mail at their much bigger post office, which was about 1/4 the size of the post office in Stillwater, just down the road.
Here is a picture of Morrison Post Office today. It looks a lot bigger today than in 1982:
Morrison Post Office
I wrote about the adventures of doing the daily Mail run in the post: Power Plant Secrets Found During Daily Mail Run.
I was also trusted with the petty cash money bag that I would take with me to the Morrison Bank, where I would collect cash to replenish the Petty Cash amount, or deposit the extra money that Eldon Waugh, the Plant Manager was making from the Canteen fund.
Eldon Waugh looking especially happy when I returned with the Petty Cash.
After being trusted with the daily mail run for a couple of weeks, someone had the brilliant idea to send me on longer trips once each week to pick up things all over the state of Oklahoma. I mostly ended up traveling to Oklahoma City to run errands for the warehouse. Dick Dale and Mike Gibbs would give me all the instructions on where to go, since they had been doing the weekly Oklahoma City parts runs for the previous couple of years.
They were so helpful, I decided, “What the heck. I’ll take their picture”:
Pat Braden with Dick Dale and Mike Gibbs
Ok. That’s not too clear after the film sat in my glove compartment for a couple of years before I had it developed. Here’s some better pictures:
My Dear Friend Richard Dale
Mike Gibbs
I mentioned in the post above that even though I was still a summer help, I was given a special booklet that people referred to as a “PO Book”. I didn’t even think what that meant at the time that Dick Dale handed it to me. He just said that when I pick up parts from the vendors, I would have to write them a PO. It’s just like writing a check. I was just supposed to fill in the vendor’s name and the amount that the parts cost and sign it. Easy enough.
I didn’t think much about it at the time. I figured that then vendors had already been paid for the parts by the company, and the PO book was my way of giving them a receipt saying I had picked up the parts. What did I know?
So, here is what happened:
I followed Mike’s directions to the first vendor in Oklahoma City. It was a shop around the southeast area of town in an area I hadn’t ever been. I eventually found the vendor’s building and since they were supposed to give me something big enough that it was going to be loaded into the back of the truck, I went ahead and backed up to the only dock and parked the truck.
When I walked into the building, three guys (I would call them Okies, since they somehow reminded me instantly that I was in Oklahoma — It’s hard to explain how. You just had to be there) gave me a surprised look. For one thing, even though I was 21 at the time, I looked more like a kid of 16.
Ok. Side note:
The previous November, in 1981, while I was working nights (from 7pm to 7am) at “The Bakery” in Columbia Missouri while I was going to School, my friend, Ben Cox (also working at the Bakery) asked a young lady customer that was talking to me how old she thought I was. She looked at me for a moment. I could tell she was trying to be nice to me when she said, “16?”. Obviously, I looked more like 14. She was just trying to be nice. I always looked like a kid, because that was about how old I was as far as how mature I was.
Ben then said, “Yeah. Well. He’s 21.” I nodded in agreement. The young lady looked surprised.
Ben Cox, My friend, and coworker at the Bakery and the Power Plant
So, when I walked into the vendor’s office where I was purchasing a fairly large piece of equipment for the power plant, these three guys looked at me as if a high school kid had just walked through the door.
I walked up to the counter and told them I was there to pick up the equipment that we had ordered. I just needed it loaded into the back of the truck. The three guys looked at me as if I was kidding them.
If the movie “The Christmas Story” had been made at that time, then I would have thought that they were acting like the Santa Claus in the movie when he says, “What do you want for Christmas, Little Boy!?!?” Only that movie didn’t come out until the following year.
Santa Clause from the Movie: Christmas Story, 1983, asking “What do you want for Christmas Little Boy?”
So, I just looked at them like, “What? I thought this was already paid!” I could see the look of humor on their faces.
The guy talking to me said, “We can’t just give it to you unless you pay for it.”
So, I had this look on my face like Ralph when he realizes that he can’t remember what he wants for Christmas:
Ralph looking like me looking at the vendors. See. I told you I looked young.
I looked at the other two guys looking at me with grins on their faces and realized, I must have forgotten something in the instructions that Dick Dale and Mike Gibbs had given me.
So, I just reached into my back pocket and pulled out the PO booklet and said, “All I have is this.” And I showed it to them.
The three guys looked momentarily astonished and the guy that had been talking to me said, “Wait. You have a Purchase Order Book for OG&E?!?!”
They were so impressed that someone as young as me was granted the privilege of carrying around a Purchase Order book for the Electric Company! They told me with that booklet I could buy anything I wanted from them. The three of them all of the sudden changed their demeanor. Now they looked at me with awe.
I told them I just wanted what we had ordered from them. They asked me if I would like to throw in anything extra. They could just add it to the order. I knew they were just kidding (I think).
That was when I realized that when Dick Dale and Mike Gibbs had given the PO book to me, they were entrusting me with something that would allow me to purchase anything up to $20,000 at a time. I knew that was the limit, because it was written right there at the top of each of the Purchase Orders. It was just like writing a check.
So, 23 years later, when I was working at Dell, and I was in IT support, one of the applications I supported was the Expense Reporting application called Concur. I have mentioned this before.
Concur Expense Reporting, now owned by SAP
I already pointed out that around this time, I had become the Oracle Financials Application Administrator. in 2006, when I moved to the business, I also had free reign over the Expense Reporting tool. I had a similar feeling at that point that I had years earlier when OG&E (the electric company) had trusted me with their Purchase Order booklet.
I had learned from my experience while growing up that there were two ways that a person could defraud the company (or the other way around). That was either with Expense Reports, or on their timecard. See the post: Power Plant Snitch for more information about cheating on Expense Reports. See Dell Salary and Power Plant Wages for more information about stealing overtime.
When I first arrived at Dell in 2001, one of the first things my manager, Jim Mosher asked me to do was to apply for a Corporate Credit Card. That way if I had to purchase anything for work, I could use the card and fill out an expense report and the company would pay for it, as long as it was reasonable. Later when I had full access to the Expense Reporting database and application, I realized that this was a great responsibility.
I also realized that if anything happened that was suspicious, the first person they would look at would be me, since I had the opportunity to manipulate the data if I chose to be a criminal. The reason I looked like a kid was because I always had a good conscience because I was always honest. — I mean, except when I’m playing a joke on someone and other occasions where my wife called me “rotten”.
I would include another side story here about fraud, but I’ll save that for another time.
Since I was the person that had access to the backend of the Expense Reporting data, everything I did was monitored by the fraud department. Yeah. Dell has a fraud department that does nothing more than look for fraud. The fraud department contacted me several times over the years to run reports from the databases for both the timekeeping application and the expense reporting tool. The legal department did as well, whenever there was a lawsuit where someone said they weren’t paid properly.
Maybe when I talk about fraud, I’ll include the story about what happened at a call center in Oregon.
As I said, I was constantly monitored. So, every expense report I submitted was scrutinized to make sure it was a legitimate charge. Somehow this made me feel comforted knowing that someone was watching everything I did. That way, they could see that I was following all the rules.
There was one instance in 2009 when I went to a local user’s conference for Kronos, our timekeeping application in Dallas. They wanted me to speak about something, but because someone else didn’t show up, they decided to cancel the meeting where I was speaking. The guy in charge said that even though I didn’t speak, they wanted to give me the gift they would have given me if I did speak.
The guy handed me a box, and when I opened it, I saw that there was a very nice IPod in there (IPads weren’t available until the following year in 2010). I knew this must have a value of a couple hundred dollars, and that our company policy was that we couldn’t accept a gift like this that had a value over $25.00 unless it was a meal so, I told the guy that I couldn’t accept the gift.
My manager, George Brooks who was standing next to me at the time, told me that it would be ok if I took the gift, since no one would know about it at Dell. The Kronos representative said, “Well, it’s yours.” Then he walked off leaving me holding the box.
This bothered me that I was given this gift that I should not have received, so when I returned to the office the following day, I called HR and asked them who I could talk to about receiving a gift that was over the gift limit. They gave me the name of someone I could talk to, so I showed up at her cubicle in Round Rock 1 a little while later with the IPod.
I explained to her that I had received this gift when I went to speak at a local user’s conference for Kronos, our timekeeping application. She told me I shouldn’t have accepted it. I agreed with her, but the guy had insisted and wouldn’t take it back. My problem was, what should I do now?
She explained that Dell could take the gift and give it to a charity, so she asked me what charity I would like to donate it to. Since a month earlier, we had gone to the Texas Baptist Children’s Home to paint and make minor repairs for an offsite, I suggested we donate it to them. I left the IPod with her, and she said she would see that they received the gift. I walked away with a clear conscience once again.
The Difference Between Growing and Mowing Grass at a Power Plant and How this Impacted Dell
I’m slow sometimes. It takes a while for some things to soak in. Especially when incompetence is involved that clouds the issue. That is what happened to me those years when I was working as a summer help at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. During the second summer, when I was working in the garage with Stanley Elmore as my foreman, I was assigned to the small team that were trying to grow grass around the new power plant. Once I perfected the art of irrigation as I explained in the post: When Power Plant Men Talk… It Pays To Listen, I observed another behavior taking place that seemed totally unrelated at the time, though was more significant than I realized, and would eventually affect the way Dell Computers ran its IT Department 30 years later.
It is the difference between growing grass and mowing it.
Water Cannon similar to ours
You see. When I first was assigned to water the grass (or dirt, as it appeared at the time), the company had just had the dirt around the north side of the plant sprigged with grass. That means, that sprigs of grass were planted in the dirt instead of spreading grass seed.
A sprig of grass
The summer when I was first growing grass at the plant, the roads were being paved. This may sound like a side note. I thought so also. In fact, “Growing Grass” and “Paving the Road” are much more related to each other than “Growing Grass” and “Mowing Grass”. Let me explain.
The following summer in 1981, the summer help in the garage were no longer planting grass, they were mowing it. The same grass I had helped grow the previous summer. The roads that were paved, were ripped up and being paved again. The company, Evans and Associates, who had paved the roads the previous summer were there paving the same roads again. I heard someone say that with all the heavy equipment driving on the roadways, they needed to pave the roads again. Ok. I guess that explains why I-35 north of Oklahoma City was still being repaved over and over since I was 3 years old (and then 20, the summer of 1981).
When I came back to work at the plant for my fourth summer in 1982, guess what. The roads were once again ripped up and repaved again. Evans and Associates were out there again paving the same roads. Ok. There must be something more going on here than hits the pavement. That’s when someone told me. I think it was Stanley Elmore.
When I was growing grass, I was working for an engineering inspector named Colonel Sneed. He worked out of the green engineer’s shack. He would drive around in his pickup truck watching me setting up the water guns and running the irrigation piping. He eventually let the other two men assigned to him go, and I ended up working 12-hour days 7 days a week the rest of the summer. I was being loaned to Colonel Sneed because he was in charge of growing the grass. Stanley was in charge of mowing the grass, which was being done out in the fields further away from the immediate plant grounds.
See the grass at the bottom of the picture?
Why Colonel Sneed and not Stanley Elmore? For the same reason that the Engineering Inspectors were in charge of repaving the roads with Evans and Associates. Growing Grass and Paving Roads are “Capital Projects”.
Oh! I see light bulbs lighting up all across the nation as accountants are reading this post and finally realize the point I am making. That’s right. Capital projects. Mowing grass, on the other hand is an expense. So, why did the unimaginative Plant Manager repave the roads every summer? It didn’t really have to do with the roads wearing out. It had to do with something else on the Balance Sheet. Something called, “Depreciation”. Hmm. I see a few of those light bulbs have turned into question marks, so let me explain.
When the power plant first came online, the value of the Power Plant is determined to be so much. From the moment it starts selling electricity, the plant begins to depreciate. That means, “It gets older”. There are basically three different Financial Statements, the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement and the Cash Flow Statement. On the Balance Sheet, there is a line item called: “Property and Equipment”. Well, imbedded in the “Property and Equipment amount is “Depreciation”.
What this means is that over time, your Property and Equipment will decrease in value, unless you keep adding value to it by spending money on Capital Projects (which adds value to your property). Well. Growing Grass adds value. Mowing Grass does not.
Eventually, the annual road paving stopped. I figured that was because during overhauls we spent our time replacing equipment and boiler tubes with new equipment. All the cost of an overhaul would be a Capital Project, since it adds value to the property and equipment. Once those were going full steam, we no longer had to create bogus reasons to have capital projects to maintain the actual value of our power plant on the Balance Sheet for the company.
I know what some of you are thinking, since you have been there before, but there is a reason why the Electric Company wanted the Power Plant to be worth as much as possible at the time. It had to do with convincing the Corporation Commission that our electric rates should be raised by a certain amount, because we had to build this “Big Beautiful Plant”, to share a phrase I recently heard. That’s probably why we kept over 3 months of Coal sitting on the coal pile. Inventory is an item on the Balance Sheet.
Interesting, huh? So, why repave a road over and over instead of making a real improvement? You know. This explains why the Labor Crew building at the coal yard cost over a million dollars to build (which is $4.1 million today). Why didn’t Eldon Waugh spend the money to build a recreation center for the employees just out his window in that big empty field instead? Oh. I forgot. Eldon didn’t look at employees as Assets on the Balance Sheet. He looked at them as Expenses on the Income Statement. I always thought that was a big mistake.
So, what happened when I went to Dell? What did I find?
You see, when a developer creates a new application, or improves on one, then this is a “Capital Project” that creates value for the company. When someone supports an application and makes sure that it is running correctly; that’s an expense.
Well. When I first arrived at Dell, I was on a team called “Customer Experience”. Just about everyone on the team was assigned to support certain applications, and many of us were also given projects to create or improve applications. So, we worked both sides of the Financial Statements at the same time, whether any of us realized it or not. I suspect that we were all lumped into the Income Statement as an “Expense”.
About a year and a half after I arrived, in 2003, someone finally realized that we weren’t properly tracking our “Assets” vs our “Expenses” with our employees, so they had us break up into functional teams, instead of the cross-functional teams I found when I first arrived. I was on a development team at first. Maybe this was because we were now included in the Finance IT department, and Finance IT understood the importance.
As a side note:
Once I was on the Finance IT Team, whenever you won a prize at an offsite (which I typically did, because I am lucky), the taxes on the “gift” would be deducted from your paycheck. (Gee. Thanks for the prize). I remember winning three movies on DVDs at a Finance IT offsite and they charged me $10 tax for winning the prize, and I wouldn’t have ever bought those three movies, because they weren’t worth anything to me. I never watched them. I donated them to Goodwill. So, yeah. Thanks for that.
Later, when Dell bought Perot Systems, and Dell officially moved to a “Services” company instead of a “Manufacturing” company, the difference between a capital project and an expense became more important. We reached the point where almost everything was considered a Capital project. They wanted us to have less and less of our work count as an expense.
The changes finally culminated in the entire IT Organization moving under the Finance Business! That meant that we were included in any activities the CFO (Chief Finance Officer) wanted us to do. This included that during summer months, we could leave around noon on Fridays to go spend time with our families! It’s funny, but that never seemed to work out where I was concerned. I seemed to have something going on, right up to the end of the day. It was fun having that option anyway.
Back at the Power Plant in 1994 the Electric Company realized that now that they had to compete against other electric companies and Co-ops for customers, we had to be the low-cost electric providers, so instead of trying to have the Corporation Commission raise our rates, we had to seriously downsize and lower our rates. The Corporation Commission in Oklahoma was more than happy to oblige by lowering our rates so low that we had to layoff half of the plant just to stay afloat.
At that point, the property value of the plant was a liability, because we had to pay taxes on our property and inventory. So, the amount of coal on the coal pile was greatly reduced as well as the number of employees. Outbuilding, such as the old Engineering shack and storage buildings were torn down. We went from having 250 employees down to 124 employees. This worked only because every employee that was left was a dedicated worker with years of experience.
We did something similar at Dell. They normally had minor layoffs every 6 months to a year. You would come into work; there would be a meeting, and you would find off that some of your team members were no longer employed. No apparent rhyme or reason. Eventually, we had so few employees in IT that there was often only one person in charge of a given application. The company’s goal was that IT costs would only be 1% (that’s one percent) of revenue. This was unheard of. It is normally between 5 and 10 percent. Dell’s IT spend was one of the lowest in the world at 1.35% of revenue one year.
After being there for 12 years, I was the only person in IT that supported all of the timekeeping and expense reporting globally. I also supported all of the legal applications and many of the other corporate applications that wasn’t HR related. My friend Stephen Todd on my team supported all of the security applications around the world.
Stephen Todd – Is that Texas BBQ?
I mentioned Stephen, because I wanted to put his picture eating Texas BBQ in the post.
You can see what havoc was wreaked upon Dell when one of us left. When I left to go work at General Motors, I was told by my manager that I had to be gone in two weeks after I gave my notice, even though I had to transition my applications to someone else. Later when I was at General Motors, another Finance person Garrett Jackson who was also working at General Motors, that when I left, the company was in a panic for about 3 months as they recovered from not having anyone that knew how to support the Expense Reporting and Timekeeping interfaces.
I went to grow grass at General Motors in 2014.
As a final note: I said this over and over during my 45 years working at the Power Plant and working at Dell and General Motors. “Employees are not expenses! They are Assets!” As long as we view an employee as just an expense, we fail to recognize the full impact of their experience, dedication and drive. We think that a layoff is the answer when the company has a shortfall. How is losing 50% of your brainpower a good thing? Put all that brainpower to work to come up with ways that will benefit the company. Don’t throw it away needlessly.
The Saddest and Most Wonderful Power Plant Post about a Dell Employee Ever
Power Plant Men who worked with me for 20 years at the Sooner Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma thought that someday I would write about the tragic events that took place over that time. During the first 4 years, I covered every sad or tragic event I could remember. I explained about how whenever a real tragedy occurred, everyone at the plant was affected. The day we learned of these events, when we grabbed our tool buckets and walked across the Turbine-Generator basement where the steam roared through the pipes to spin the turbine, we just walked in silence. As the roaring thunder shook our bodies, our minds tuned it out, so that we walked in silence. We were thinking and praying for our fellow worker who was suffering at that moment.
During the time I worked at the plant, there was never a person that I can remember that died from an injury caused by an accident. Some people had family members who died, and we learned occasionally that someone who had left the company had died. I told a story about Jim Padgett, who left the night shift and drove home, and walked in his front door and died in the post: Making Friends From Foes — A Tale of Power Plant Woes.
I know that the Human Resources department down at Corporate Headquarters has no idea that the people that work in a Power Plant environment eventually become one big family. It doesn’t mean we all became friends. It just means that we knew each other in ways people in a corporate environment never experience. You know about the families of those working around you. You know about the struggles they go through. You know about the lives of their children as they grow up. HR just sees us a tool to reach a goal.
Power Plant life if unique. It’s not like working in a factory. I have worked on a General Motors assembly line, and you may never even know the name of the person working on the assembly line next to you. In a Power Plant, you work side-by-side sharing stories, jokes, memories, news and played games with each other. In one sense we were like children in a playground. In another sense, we were like old men sitting outside a cafe on a bench talking about the people we see going by. We listened to music together. We looked into the face of the person sitting across from us to see if they were all right. We shared secrets, dreams, desires and gossip.
When I went to work at Dell in 2001, I found that this sort of friendship was hard to develop when we worked alone in a cubicle or sat in a meeting with the rest of the team. I didn’t immediately find the one-on-one interaction that we had at the plant. That was why at first, I began writing to my friends back at the plant each week. I was sitting in a cubicle in a building with 500 employees on our floor and for the most part, the large room was quiet. In fact, it was so quiet, I could hear the louvres in the ceiling adjusting as the air conditioner redirected the air based on the local temperature in my section of the floor in order to maintain a steady temperature.
After the first year, we moved from our Round Rock Campus building to the Parmer Campus, 5 miles south as the crow flies. There were four buildings. Three of them were larger and had about 3,000 people in each one. Each building had more people in them than all the employees in the entire electric company in Oklahoma. Our building, which was Parmer 1, was mainly IT people.
I had been working there about a year when I had a meeting with my manager, Jim Steele to discuss my performance review. I had to set some goals for next year, and Jim mentioned that there is this group called “Toastmasters” that met in the Parmer 2 (next door), each week. It taught you how to be a better public speaker.
Jim Steele with his horse.
Hmm. Toastmasters. I figured it was a group of people that practiced giving toasts during a party. Jim suggested that I join Toastmasters as a way to improve my public speaking. So, I did.
It seemed like the Toastmasters group at Dell was new when I joined. There were a couple of people there who knew how Toastmasters worked, and they told us that for a lot of people, the most terrifying thing in the world was speaking in public. Even more terrifying than dying. That wasn’t the case for me. I had taught adults and high school kids before. Speaking in public was not difficult.
The other thing they pointed out was that while a person is speaking, they use “filler” words, like “um”, “like”, “so”, while they are thinking about their next sentence to buy time. So, you may listen to someone speaking where every other word is “um”. Toastmasters is the place to cure this habit so you can speak more clearly. I could learn from that. They actually have a person assigned while you are speaking to count your “um’s”. Then they give a report after you give your speech.
I don’t remember how long I attended Toastmasters. It may have been about a year. I do remember why I left.
One day we had a new member come to our meeting. When she stood up to introduce herself to us, it was obvious why she was there. She was terrified of speaking to a group. She was a young lady, that appeared to be a new college hire. Maybe 22 years old. I figured that her manager suggested that she join Toastmasters to learn how to overcome her phobia of speaking to a group.
Toastmasters is very good at giving positive feedback. Whenever someone finishes speaking, everyone claps. In fact, if you happen to be near a meeting room somewhere and the people in the meeting keep clapping over and over, most likely there is a Toastmasters group having a meeting in there. You generally come away from a Toastmaster meeting with red palms from clapping so much.
I do not remember the young lady’s name, so I will call her Ashley, since the word “shy” is in that name. She reminds me of someone called Ashley. She had short blonde hair and a very sweet face.
She was very nervous while she gave her first speech, and everyone in the room could feel the pain that she was feeling as she struggled through it. When she was finished, she looked down and seemed very embarrassed. Everyone clapped and smiled back at her. She raised her eyes to see the room all clapping at her in an encouraging way. She smiled back as she walked back to her chair.
A couple of weeks later, Ashley gave her next speech. This time she couldn’t have been more perfect. We still saw a hint of fear when she began, but as the speech progressed, she seemed to become more confident as she looked around the room at everyone smiling back at her. I could see this light come into her face while she was talking. When it came to the end of the speech everyone could tell that she was as pleased with herself as we were with her. Everyone was so happy for her. She looked around the room with a huge smile on her face. She knew she had done it!
We clapped with authentic glee as she returned to her chair to hear the response from the Grammarian and the person that reviewed her speech. Ashley was so proud of herself. Her hidden slouch was gone, and she was standing up straight. As we left the room at the end of the meeting, everyone was congratulating Ashley for improving so quickly. She looked so beautiful with her newfound smile.
The following week when I arrived at the Toastmasters meeting, we were informed that when Ashley returned to her cubicle after the Toastmasters meeting the previous week, she sat down on her chair, laid her head down on her desk, and quietly died. Evidently, she had a heart defect, and she could have died at any time.
I sat there in the back of the room against the back wall and remembered how Ashley looked as she was leaving the last meeting. I burned that picture into my mind so that I would never forget the look she had the last time I saw her. I don’t think we had a meeting that day. If we did, I don’t remember it.
I remember walking back across the first floor of Parmer 2, where I passed by her cubicle. Her team had put up a memorial for her. I walked across the sidewalk to Parmer 1 and up the stairs to the fourth floor to my cubicle. I think I just sat there the rest of the day without doing any work.
I think my thoughts were like most of the other Toastmasters. We had seen Ashley just before she died, and she was the happiest person in the world. I don’t know if anyone ever told her parents, but we knew. When Ashley sat in her cubicle and her heart stopped beating, it was at a moment in her life where she had just experienced the friendship of a room full of people who loved her.
After a couple more weeks of going to Toastmasters, I stopped going. On my way to the meeting room, I walked over to Parmer 2, and I would walk by Ashley’s cubicle. It just made me feel like there were other things I needed to do during that time. So, I stopped going.
I have often thought about the death of Ashley. She knew when she left the room that last time that she was surrounded by a group of people who loved her. Isn’t that the best way to die?
Jim Padgett, I believe, knew how I felt about him when I walked out of the Shift Supervisor’s office just a few hours before he died in a similar way.
I have tried to make it a habit of making sure that those people I care about know that I love them. In some cases, it has come out a little awkward. That doesn’t matter. I don’t know when the last time will be that I may see them. In this life anyway.
I am looking forward to seeing them again.
How Does Power Plant Lagniappe Translate to the Dell Culture?
I can see the Power Plant Men saying, “What the heck is that?” Well, fellow retired Power Plant Men, “Lagniappe” is a word that we learned the year that the Quality Process came knocking on our door on January 13, 1993. You may remember the Praxis Group. Yeah, those guys.
Our Quality Manual
Remember “Meeting or Exceeding Customer Expectations”? Well, the special word they taught us for “Exceeding” Customer Expectations was Lagniappe. It means when you give a customer a little something extra. One of the many Dictionaries defines it this way: “An extra bonus, gratuity, or free gift added for good measure.” Is it starting to sound familiar? It’s something a business gives to a customer that is unexpected.
One of the examples the Praxis guy, Rick Olson gave us was when we go and fix something, after we are done, we might sweep out the area. I remember thinking at the time that maybe spraying a little Lysol or an air freshener might be a good idea. Actually, what I thought was that we do that already. As an electrician, we tried to leave the job looking good. We spend a lot of time cleaning up a motor when we worked on it, so that it looked shiny when we put it back in place. We did this even when the motor would go in a concealed location on the back of a transformer fan where no one will ever be able to see it.
We thought that “cleanliness was next to Godfreyness”:
Our Illustrious Supervisor Leroy Godfrey
Because we knew that was what Godfrey would have wanted. He had already retired by the time we were learning the Quality Process. By the way, I wrote a post about when we first learned about the Quality Process: “A Chance for Power Plant Men to Show Their Quality“.
When I arrived at Dell, during Bootcamp, we learned that there was a Quality Process at Dell. It was optional. You could win certain Karate Belts when you came up with enough quality savings or earnings. I went as far as a Green Belt. I remember my Project Manager, Laura Dronen, who was a Quality Facilitator, tried to convince me that I should submit something I had done as a Quality project, because we had saved the company a bunch of money.
Laura Dronen’s LinkedIn Photo
I was just thinking, “Well, this is Lagniappe. It’s part of my job.” Actually, I don’t usually think of that word. They didn’t teach us about Lagniappe at Dell. They taught us all the same tools that we learned at the Power Plant, but they didn’t focus on “Exceeding” the customer’s expectations.
as a side note:
After our project was over, which was to do the first Kronos Timekeeping upgrade from a desktop application to a web app, my manager, Jim Steele and Laura Dronen took me out to lunch with my wife, Kelly. After lunch was over, Kelly said, “Laura is such a lady.” I had to agree. It was fun having her as my project manager on that project.
Incidentally, this project went live on January 12, 2004. Exactly one day before the 11th anniversary of the day the quality process was introduced to us at the Power Plant.
End of side note
You see, at Dell, it might not always be good to “Exceed” the customer’s expectations. Picture this. You add a new feature to an application, because you think that the customer will want this in the future. Then when they look at it, they are mad because they didn’t ask for that. Yeah. If it isn’t in the requirements, you shouldn’t give it to them. That’s what I learned rather early on when I was at Dell.
I think I remember telling the Power Plant Men in a letter I wrote to them, that I added a “snoring” feature to an application, so that if the person doesn’t press a key in a few minutes, the application started snoring. see the post: Letter to the Power Plant #18 — Project Update at Dell. Well, this didn’t account for someone going to use the restroom or going for lunch. So, once the application started to snore, that person became mad because his coworkers thought he was sleeping in his cube. — Ok. So, the truth is that I was playing a joke on someone. It wasn’t really a new feature.
After that, when I added a new feature, I kept it disabled, until someone said, “You know what would be nice? If we could just copy an entire list into a text box and process hundreds of records all at once”. Then I would say, as I was typing in a secret code that enabled that feature, “Do you mean like this?”
I was reminded the last time I went up to Stillwater Oklahoma for a reunion lunch (on September 8, 2026), by Ray Eberle about the time that I changed the “SAP is thinking” icon of a water dripping and creating a ripple into a selection of either a Ship sailing by, or a fish jumping out of the water, or our HR Administrator being sucked down into a whirlpool. In that case I made a little application where you could choose which icon you wanted. I remember Linda Shiever having fun watching her boss being sucked down into the whirlpool and being able to change it right back in case she walked into her cubicle.
Linda Shiever
I wrote a post about that here: Hitting the Power Plant HR Cardboard Ceiling.
I found a lot of times when collecting requirements that the customer really didn’t know what they wanted. A lot of times, they wanted to just keep doing what they were already doing without changing their process. So, when I was a Business Analyst and I collected requirements, I would tell the customer that I knew nothing about how the application worked, so I am going to ask really dumb questions, just so that I can understand why they want to do what they wanted to do.
Once I bowed in humility to the customer, they were happy to tell me all about the way they wanted it. Then I would ask dumb questions, like, “Well, would this part work better if you could skip that part and have the application figure that out for you?” — I would ask it in a way that seemed like I was just trying to understand what was going on. What I was really doing was telling them how I would do it but making them think that they were coming up with the idea themselves.
I did have one customer at Dell ask me if I could put in a special little feature that only he would know about so that when he was taking a break, he could bring it up and have some fun. I knew I could do it easily enough, but I told him I better not, I might get in trouble. I won’t tell you who asked me, so you will never know that it was Mark Hammett.
Mark Hammett
I’m just messing with you Mark. I know. You don’t know what I’m talking about.
I will go into a bigger discussion about this in a later post, but in 2012, Dell purchased a company called Quest Software. It was my job to integrate the employees from Quest into Dell’s Expense Reporting and Timekeeping applications. Without going into too much detail here, since I’ll cover it in more detail later, let me explain what happened when I was gathering requirements for integrating them into our Expense Reporting system.
Dell’s businessperson in charge of the expense reporting system Concur was Lindsey Dudik.
Lindsey Dudik
We travelled to Aliso Viejo in Orange County California to Quest’s headquarters to gather requirements. They insisted that they would never need to perform cross-charging of account codes for expenses. No way, no how. They said this because the way they had designed their accounting software made it almost impossible to allow for cross charging in our Expense Report system. I’ll explain why later.
Anyway. I knew that in order for the business to function properly, cross charging was going to be required. So, I went ahead and developed their integration so that cross-charging would work. They would just have to jump through some hoops to make that happen.
Then it came down to about two weeks before we were going to go-live with their employees in our system, early in September 2012. Lindsey and I were sitting in the conference room in their headquarters in California, and the guy that had designed their finance system (which is what they were using for expense reporting as well), came into the room. All of the Quest employees involved in the requirements for the project were there and they had a sort of smirk on their faces.
They said, “Well, it turns out that our VP said that we can’t go live on Dell’s expense reporting system unless we have the ability for cross charging the account codes.”
Lindsey and I both knew that would be the case.
The Quest employees thought they had just thrown a wrench into our project, since in order for them to make a similar change in their application would require months of work, they wouldn’t be able to go live on Concur on time, and so they would stay on their own system.
After they revealed their new “requirement”. I looked at their IT guy, and around the room at their faces, all trying to hide their glee. Then I said, “That’s ok. I figured you were going to need to cross charge, because you can’t really do business without it, so I already added the ability into the integration.”
I had also worked out with the business how they would manage cross charging on their end since they had to do some manual things when they couldn’t provide us with enough information. They agreed. We went live on time and for our part, Lindsey and I were successful.
You see. Quest Software didn’t know I had been trained in providing “Lagniappe” at the Power Plant 19 years earlier.
Tell Dell Survey: If You Don’t Want to Hear the Answer Don’t Ask the Question
During the summer of 1979, when the President of the Electric Company, James Harlow visited the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma for the first time, he told us that he would come and visit the plant every year to see how we are doing. Then he made a Faux Pas (pronounced Foe Paw).
James G Harlow President of OG&E from 1973 to 1996
With all of the power plant sitting in the main conference room, James G. Harlow asked everyone, “How are things going at the plant?”
He wasn’t prepared for the answers that he received. The Power Plant Men began by asking; “Why do we have to wear our hard hats when we walk out to our car and to go fishing, when you don’t have to do that at other plants?” Then, “Why do we have to park over at the Engineer’s shack instead of the nice concrete parking lot by the main entrance to the plant?” and “Why don’t we have enough trucks?” and “Why can’t we fish at the Intake when you can fish at the intake at the other plants?” Etc.
Needless to say, when James Harlow asked the mechanics, welders, machinists, electricians, millwrights, operators and instrument and controls technicians how things were going, he didn’t mean for them to literally tell him how things were going. I think he was expecting everyone to whoop and holler and clap in glee that the first unit was finally producing electricity, and their illustrious President had blessed them with his presence. Instead, he was hit with a barrage of questions about why the plant manager and assistant plant manager were making their lives so miserable.
After stuttering for a few minutes, he finally said, “Well, I better be getting back to Oklahoma City. I’ll see you next summer.” Well. I was there all during the following summer, and I don’t ever remember seeing him there. I’m not sure that he returned to the plant over the next 17 years until he retired.
My response: If you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question.
Before I left the Power Plant in 2001 to go work for Dell, the company had been doing a 360 assessment for all their employees. This meant that people who managed you, your coworkers, and your customers all evaluated your performance. This way everyone could find out what other workers thought about how they were doing and how they could improve their performance. It was awkward at first, but after a while I think everyone figured out that what goes around, comes around, and they tempered their responses to be more informative and less punitive. I was a 360 Assessment counselor, so I heard the good, bad and ugly responses. I wrote about this in the post: 360 Degrees of Power Plant Grief Counseling.
When I arrived at Dell in August 2001, after I had been there for about five months, I received my first performance review. Just like when I received my first performance appraisal at the Power Plant given to me by Larry Riley, when my manager, Jim Mosher gave me my performance appraisal, it sounded very promising. I had met my manager’s expectations in every category.
Jim Mosher
After I read it, and I came to the end, there was a ranking number. I think it was like a letter from A to D, with A being the best. Instead of having the letter A, or even a B, he had given me a C. He explained to me that even though he was tracking me as a B, he was only giving me a C, that meant that I would not be receiving any raise this year. He didn’t think it was fair that I should have a raise after only being there for 5 months. — Never mind that I had received the offer of employment over a year earlier. Jim explained that instead of giving me a raise, he wanted to give that money to other people on the team who had been there all year. What this meant was that it would be another year before I would have a chance to have a raise. — So, in 2003.
As you can guess, I was not happy with this outcome, since I had started working as a new undergraduate college hire when I could easily do the same work as developers who had years of experience. At the bottom of the performance review was a comment box, so I wrote in the box that my manager told me that he was tracking me as a B but gave me a C so that he could give bigger raises to other members of the team. — Just so it was clear to anyone reading it.
Shortly after I received that appraisal, we had a new Director, Diana Keating.
Diana Keating’s Facebook photo
I explained to her what had happened (I think I explained this in an earlier post, but I’m repeating it here, because of the topic), and he said that was unfortunate. Because of the way HR works, it makes it difficult to fix this problem. She said, “It’s easier sometimes to just leave the company and get hired back at a higher salary.” I explained that I couldn’t do that, since I was supporting a family. So, what Diana did was she gave me a promotion when my one-year anniversary came up. This was better than just a raise.
Dell at the time had this survey that would come out once each year called the “Tell Dell Survey”. It had different sections where you could tell you what you thought about management at all different levels. You could complain, or compliment your chain of command, or even the entire company. This was the workers opportunity that James G. Harlow accidently stumbled on in 1979 when he asked, “How are things going?”
Having learned from the Power Plant Men during my youth, it was hard for me to keep my mouth shut when I saw something wrong, or even when I saw something right. Actually, come to think of it, it was hard for me to keep my mouth shut period if I had something that I thought needed to be said.
Anyway, if you don’t have to hear the answer then don’t ask the question.
During the Fall of 2004, when I was working for Finance IT Support, my manager was a man named Sandeep Kulkarni (and I don’t mean the Indian Actor).
Sandeep Kulkarni’s LinkedIn Photo
I’ll say right off the bat that Sandeep was a pretty good manager. He was probably a little younger than I was, even though I still looked younger. I mean, he had less hair than I did. Anyway. I liked Sandeep.
When the Tell Dell Survey results were disseminated to the teams, the manager received the results about how his team had rated him. So, you see how the tables turned? Not only would our manager give us a performance appraisal, at Dell, we would give our manager one. We would even give our Director and VP an appraisal. I think their raise may even have been tied to this.
When Sandeep had received his results, he called a meeting with our team to discuss it. — You know what I mean… Opportunities for Improvement and that sort of thing.
There was one question that was the same every year. It was, “Does your manager respect your opinion?” This was Sandeep’s lowest score on his survey results. Now, he could have kept this to himself and just tried to improve on his own. Maybe he could occasionally remind himself that he needs to at least appear like he respected his team’s opinions.
For some reason, which became obvious, Sandeep didn’t understand why his team had come to the conclusion that we felt as if he didn’t respect our opinions. So, he called a meeting to discuss this, and also to let us know how the rest of the survey results came out. I believe there were 8 of us in the meeting room when Sandeep asked us why we had almost unanimously said that we didn’t think he respected our opinion.
I was sitting to the right of Sandeep at the back corner of the long table, so I had a good view of everyone’s faces. So, I watched as they fidgeted around feeling awkward. There was one person sitting across from me that wasn’t looking down. He was looking at me. He was the only one in the room that was actually older than I was. This was my future friend, Stephen Todd.
Stephen Todd – Is that Texas BBQ?
Stephen was not smiling like he is when he’s eating Barbeque. He saw me looking around the room at the faces. I was once again waiting to see if anyone wanted to say anything before I revealed the answer that Sandeep was asking for. After all. If you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.
I thought the best way to answer the question was to tell Sandeep the truth, so, after 15 seconds of awkward silence, I semi-quietly said, “Sandeep, I think we fill that you don’t value our opinions because when we express them to you, you always tell us why we are wrong.”
Sandeep looked a little bit confused by my response, so he said, “No, what I actually do is that I try to explain more about why what I’m saying is correct. That’s not the same….”
At this point I interrupted Sandeep and staring right at him, I said rather sternly, “Sandeep. You are doing it right now!”
Later Stephen told me that when I said that everyone in the room seemed to stop breathing. I could see the stunned look on Sandeep’s face as he realized that was exactly what he was doing.
You know what I was thinking. I was thinking, “If you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.”
I don’t know what Sandeep thought about me after that meeting. He didn’t seem to hold it against me. After all, this was the Tell Dell Survey. You were supposed to be able to speak your mind. I never felt that Sandeep’s attitude toward me had changed, and it didn’t affect the way I did my job, so this encounter was soon forgotten… until now. <smile>
Using Power Plant Boredom Tactics to Tackle Dell’s Capability Maturity Model
I’m sure that all of the people from Dell have been waiting (with bated breath) the past 14 years for me to broach the topic of the Capability Maturity Model. Well, it’s finally here!
But.
Before I begin to explain one of the most fascinating frameworks of Project Management, I am reminded of a story that I heard from Aubrey Cargill in 1980, one year after the time when during my first summer at the Sooner Power Plant in 1979 I had worked with Dee Ball cleaning up the park. I was reminded the moment I typed the phrase above: “With bated breath”.
It all began when I was working with Dee Ball cleaning up the park on the south side of Sooner Lake in Oklahoma.
Map of the Power Plant Lake
We were working where it shows the word “Beach” and “Picnic Area”. Right next to the southwestern most picture of a fish.
A year later after we had to empty some trash barrels full of rotten fish guts crawling with maggots the size of grub worms, when we returned back at the shop, while we were taking a break and the subject of maggots came up, Aubrey Cargill told us a story about some fisherman that he met when he went ice fishing someplace up north.
He said that he was sitting in a small hut fishing through a hole in the ice with some other guy. It was very cold, and Aubrey was trying to figure out how to keep his bait warm because he didn’t want his earthworms to turn into icicles. I mean, how do you thread a worm popsicle onto a hook?
He looked around to see what the other guy was doing to keep his bait warm. He just had a small grubby plastic container sitting on the ice. It didn’t seem like he had any better idea. So, as they fished, Aubrey kept an eye on his fishing buddy.
When it came time for the other guy to bait his hook, he saw him stick his finger in his mouth, and between his lower lip and his teeth he pulled something out and baited his hook with it. Aubrey’s curiosity got the better of him, so he asked him, “What do you have there?”
The other guy opened up the small plastic container lying beside him and pulled out a semi-frozen maggot about 3 quarters of an inch long, and put it in his mouth, between his lower lip and his teeth. Then he just said, “Maggots. That’s how I keep them warm so I can bait my hook.” After Aubrey left to go eat lunch, he didn’t return to ice fish with his newfound buddy. Something about an upset stomach…
Why did I suddenly remember this story after 46 years? Well, when I said the phrase, “Bated Breath”, I immediately thought about this guy who actually had “Baited Breath!”
I’m pretty sure the old timers at the plant that are still alive remember this story. — Oh. Are any of you still alive? Maybe Dee Ball? No. I just checked. Dee Ball died in 2022:
Dee Ball
Oh my gosh! I think Dee had him some new teeth before he died. I always loved that old man. Here’s one of the stories I told about Dee: Experiencing Maggots, Mud and Motor Vehicles with Dee Ball.
So, it turns out that Aubrey Cargill died in 2020. Both Dee Ball and Aubrey were born in Fletcher Oklahoma, just 2 years apart and died 2 years and 4 days apart. Here’s a story about Aubrey: Power Plant Painting Lessons with Aubrey Cargill. I loved both of these men since the first day I met them.
Here is Aubrey’s picture looking very wise.
Aubrey Cargill
Ok. Done with the side story about “Bated (Baited) Breath”. It’s time to go from Dee back to Dell. And from Maggots to Maturity.
I won’t go into detail about the Capability Maturity Model, other than to say that it is a way to organize your projects in a way that is, well, “mature”. There are different ways you do this, and if you do it right, then you can be “Certified”! Yeah. There are different levels of Certification. It’s not too hard to be certified at level 2: CMM2. But in order to become certified at CMM3, you had to do a lot of work organizing and training your employees to follow certain rules while they work on software projects.
In 2004, there was an effort for the IT department to become certified in CMM at least up to Level 3. This may have had to do with offering services to the government. I’m not sure. I’ll mention this later. I was in Finance IT at the time, and our VP, John Craparo wanted us to be the first organization to be certified at CMM3. He said that if our department was the first to be certified as CMM3, then he would shave his head.
John Craparo’s LinkedIn photo
As you can see, John is a pilot, just like Mark Romano: See the post Power Plant Marine Battles with God and Wins. I think you can also tell that John Craparo shaving his head wouldn’t be that big of a deal for him. Maybe if he said that he would dye it Dell Blue… Maybe that is what he did.
Quickly, I’ll just say that in order to reach Level 3 in the Capability Maturity Model, you have to learn seven different “Key Processing Areas”. These are: Organization Process Focus, Organization Process Definition, Training Program, Integrated Software Management, Software Product Engineering, Intergroup Coordination and Peer Reviews. I can feel the excitement building while you are reading this.
Teams were created where each team learned all they could about their assigned area, and then they had to teach what they learned to the rest of the teams. I’m not going to go into detail about this. I’m only going to point out that I was assigned to the “Integrated Software Management” team.
When we began learning about how to properly manage Integrated Software Management, we found out that there are five “disciplines”, equally exciting. I won’t tell you what these five disciplines are, because if I did, I’m sure you would stop reading this and start searching for training for each of these disciplines. Or maybe you would just go watch some silly cat videos. The suspense could be too compelling.
Let me just say that I thought the area, Integrated Software Management was probably the most boring area in the list. I would have liked to have had, “Peer Reviews”. That seems a little more interesting. Anyway, our team had to teach the other teams how this area worked. Luckily for me, not only did I have a master’s degree that taught me how to teach adults, but I also had experience teaching a very boring subject.
Some of you may remember that I had taught Substation Switchman training. See the post: Power Plant Men Learn to Cope with “Boring”. So, when we had a team meeting to discuss how we were going to teach such a boring topic as this, I just sat back and smiled.
I looked around the room and observed how most of the team just sat there with their eyes glazed over. When someone asked, “How are we going to teach this stuff to the other teams? Who wants to take “Integrated Project Monitoring”? I could see everyone looking down at the table in front of them, or up to examine how two walls and the ceiling all came together at one point. No one wanted to be picked… for any of the topics. “How about Process Tailoring”? — Was that a pin drop?
I finally decided that the moment had finally reached a climax of awkwardness, so I slowly raised my hand (a little). I said, “I can do it. I can make a presentation that will cover all seven disciplines. I can have it done in 2 weeks. Suddenly there was a large sound of gasps, as everyone who was holding their breath was finally able to breathe again. It was like that moment where Frodo said, “I’ll do it.” When he volunteered to take the Ring of Power to Mount Doom and toss it into the volcano. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
I looked through my old files, and I couldn’t find the PowerPoint project I made for this presentation. I’m not surprised. As an IT employee, everything I created for Dell, belongs to Dell. So, in that sense, “What’s created at Dell, remains at Dell.” As the saying goes. But I can describe it. Here is how the presentation was made.
First, remember that when I had to teach the most boring subject experienced by mankind, Substation Switchman Training, I enhanced it, by removing the repetitive sections of documents, and replacing that with short video clips of my daughter popping in and explaining some things.
Elizabeth the trainer
By the year 2004, Elizabeth was in the 8th grade, and she had become a professional videographer and editor. So, I asked her to help me. I went to my manager, Jim Steele and asked him if I could take a movie camera into the building, since normally, they were not allowed.
Jim Steele with his horse. He’s the one on the right.
Jim sent me to the proper department, where I explained that in order to complete this presentation for our VP, I needed to be able to film some things in the building. I would not be filming anything proprietary. They gave me a tag to put on the camera that said it was all right for me to bring it into the building. The tag had an expiration date at the end of the month.
My daughter Elizabeth rounded up a crew of four students from her school on a Saturday, and we drove down to Dell’s building called Parmer South 1.
Dell’s Parmer South 1 Building
This is where I was working at the time. Incidentally, 10 years later, when I was hired by General Motors, I came back to work in this building.
The six of us entered the front door, and I walked up to the desk where the Security Guard was standing there looking at me with an unhappy expression on his face. He had the look that Gandalf had when he was standing up against the Balrog and was saying, “You Shall Not Pass!!!”
Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings telling the Balrog he shall not pass
I explained to him that we were here to film some short film clips for a presentation that we were making for a project for the Finance IT department. I showed him the camera with the tag attached to it that said I could take it in the building.
He looked rather skeptical at me as if he was saying, “You’ve got to be kidding”. I thought now was not the time to tell him that his expression would be more properly expressive if it didn’t look like it had the word “got” in it, since I had learned while taking an English class at the Power Plant about how the word “Got” could always be replaced with a better word, like, “You ‘Must’ be kidding”. — see what I mean? I thought I would just ignore the word “got” in his expression and move past that. To learn more about the English lesson I took, look at this post: Power Plant Men Learned Themselves Proper English.
The Security Guard pointed out that the tag on the camera didn’t mean that he could allow a bunch of kids into the building. After all, they didn’t have Dell badges, and they weren’t old enough to be considered “Interns”. I explained that they were actors and the crew that was going to setup the lighting. One of them was the Director (that was Elizabeth). The Security Guard finally let us pass.
We spent the afternoon setting up a cubicle with different funny scenarios, and the four actors did their jobs coming up with funny references to the movie “Office Space”, which fit in with the five disciplines of Integrated Software Management. At one point we went out of the back door of the building where we filmed a scene in the sand of the Volleyball court. It was depicting someone who was dying of thirst out in the desert. — An analogy of what happens when you don’t lock down the requirements and allow for scope creep.
Anyway, the film clips were added to the PowerPoint Presentation, and when I presented the PowerPoint to our team, I made sure that the first couple of slides made it look like the presentation was going to be the most boring presentation they had ever encountered up to that point in their lives. Then when we came to part where we explained each of the five disciplines, the film clips played and everyone laughed. Then from that one, there wasn’t a person in the room without a smile on their face.
They had been expecting to be like this:
People Sleeping in Chairs. Just random pictures from Google. Not actual Dell employees
Instead, when the presentation was over, people came up and told me how much they enjoyed learning about Integrated Software Management!!! The most boring areas of the Capability Maturity Model Level 3.
I held out my right hand and turned it so that my palm was up. Then I bent my fingers so that the tips of the fingers were bent to the bottom of the fingers at the edge of the palm, and then I raised my hand to my mouth and blew on my fingernails. Then I wiped my fingernails on my shirt where my heart is located and said, “Why, thank you”.
John Craparo either had his head shaved or dyed an odd color at our next offsite at Reunion Ranch. We all received Tee Shirts that showed that we were all CMM3 Certified. I think my tee shirt was “accidentally” donated when Texas Paralyzed Veterans had a clothes drive. This is fitting since; both Dee Ball and Aubrey Cargill were Veterans who had served their country. At least I could give something back by donating my one of a kind CMM3 Tee Shirt for a good cause.
From Power Plant Friday Frenzy to Dell Casual Friday
The last hours I was working at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma I walked into the main conference room to attend my going away party. I had changed my clothes in the Men’s Restroom/Locker Room in the office area just before arriving. I was wearing a suit and tie along with a new pair of shiny black shoes. I looked so different than my normal self that when I shook Ed Shiever’s hand, he said he didn’t even recognize me. He thought I was someone that had arrived to attend my going away party. I had intended from the start to make my exit from the Power Plant a memorable event. In fact, 25 years later, the people that attended that meeting that are still alive have a pretty good memory of that event.
This was the look Ed Shiever had on his face when he shook my hand.
It was 18 years after Ed Shiever, and I had spent a couple of weeks inside the sand filter tanks in the water treatment plant. See the post Ed Shiever Trapped in a Confined Space with a Disciple of Ramblin’ Ann.
I described my going away party in detail in the post Power Plant Final Presentation, so I won’t go into detail now. At the beginning of the Party, people were invited to tell funny or interesting stories about me. Jim Arnold, the Supervisor of Maintenance at the time said that he didn’t think he would want to go work for a place where you had to dress up in a suit, referring to the suit I was wearing. I had bought this suit specifically to wear during interviews for jobs. In fact, I wore this same suit when I interviewed with Dell, Wal-Mart, Koch Industries, Boeing, DST Systems and JD Edwards, who all offered me jobs. I explained all of that in the post Interview Adventures of a Power Plant Electrician. I just smiled when Jim Arnold said that, because I knew I wasn’t going to be wearing that suit when I actually showed up for work. I didn’t mention that to Jim Arnold. I just let him sit there with his satisfied smile. Like this:
Jim Arnold in all of his awesomeness
I knew what picture I had at the end of my presentation, so I didn’t need to say anything to Jim Arnold at that point, so I just smiled. The very last slide in my presentation was this:
This shows Jim Arnold and Louise Kalicki waving goodbye to me from Air Force One. Just like Jim to wear his hardhat when boarding Air Force One
The normal outfit at Dell was called “Business Casual”. That meant, wearing khaki pants, and a Polo shirt and some loafers. Nothing fancy. Just the same thing I would wear when I went to Church. I won’t show a picture of someone wearing business casual, because, well. Ok. I found a picture.
Business Casual
This is basically what I wore every day to work at Dell. This was a lot different than the regular attire I wore for the previous 20 years of working at the Power Plant. That usually included a white V-Neck Tee Shirt, a pair of jeans, and work boots. Something like this:
like this, well. After I had been shoveling coal all day
and
I chose this picture because they look like my boots, only I never wore the toes out so that you could see the steel toes.
After we were done with our bootcamp in October 2001 and I was working with the team I had been assigned to, my manager came by on Friday morning and said, “You know, we have a thing called, ‘Casual Friday’. You can wear jeans and a tee shirt if you want.” I looked down at my polo shirt and casual khaki pants and thought… “No. I’ve worn jeans and tee-shirt all of my life. I like feeling all cleaned up for a change.”
It’s funny that they called our normal attire ‘Business Casual’, yet, on ‘Casual Friday’, you didn’t wear that. — To tell you the truth. You could wear jeans and a Tee-Shirt any day of the week. No one really cared. I figured that out the first time I saw Michael Dell walking around the building wearing jeans and tee-shirt. And who didn’t want to dress like Michael Dell?
Michael Dell wearing a Tee-Shirt
I thought it was interesting to contrast how Fridays were spent at the Power Plant and at Dell. At Dell, it was Casual Friday. At the Power Plant it was more like “Frantic Friday”. At the end of the day everyone was anticipating the weekend they were going to spend, hunting, fishing, drinking beer, or driving their four-wheelers around the pasture.
It is a good idea when you have an ice machine, that every once in a while, you dump out all of the ice, so that some of the ice doesn’t end up getting “stale”, because it is sitting in the corner of the ice bin day after day. At a power plant, especially during the summer, you didn’t have to worry about that, because every Friday, buckets and buckets of ice were removed from our ice machine and transferred into coolers and put in the back of pickups.
Then as long as the shift supervisor hasn’t paged the Maintenance Supervisor at the last minute before it was time to go home, then when the clock struck “Quittin’ Time”, everyone quickly migrated to the parking lot where they danced the two-step in their pickups as they maneuvered their way out of the parking lot and toward home. — It was a sight to behold.
At Dell, most of the time during my first year, my manager would come by my desk an hour before I would normally leave and tell me that I should go home early, since it’s Friday. I would nod my head and continue typing away. I was usually writing letter at that time to my family at the Power Plant telling them how my week had been.
It seemed that at Dell, when it was time to leave work on Friday, it was a casual event. Everyone wanted to go home to wind down after the frenzied week at work. At the Power Plant, it was a frenzy when everyone wanted to rush home in order to spend time with family and friends.
Power Plant Man finds Dell’s Keys to the Kingdom
I was planning on writing a most witty and exciting post today about Expense Reports at Dell, but when I went to church and heard the gospel reading, I changed my mind. The Gospel reading was Matthew 16:13-20. This is where Jesus tells Peter he is changing his name to Peter (Rock) from Simon and building his Church on his foundation. Then he gives him the keys to the kingdom so that whatever he holds bound or lets loose is held bound or let loose on earth and in heaven.
As important as this reading is to Catholics, while the deacon was giving the homily (sermon), all I could think about was my friend, Stephen Todd telling Dell’s Kronos Technical Account Manager Ariel Hernandez on the phone that Kevin was happy since Ariel had just given him the “Keys to the Kingdom.” Kronos was our timekeeping application.
Stephen Todd’s LinkedIn Photo
Ariel Hernandez during his contemplative state wondering how he had given me the keys
Just like Peter realized that being given the keys to the kingdom meant that he was now the chief steward, just like Eliakim in Isaiah 22: 19-23 who can bind and loose, I suddenly realized that I now had the keys to the Kronos kingdom where I could have intimate control over the Kronos application by using APIs (Application Programming Interface). Just like the apostles stared at Peter with envy, I can tell that the other programmers reading this are wishing they were in my shoes when I finally reached this epoch of total Kronos domination.
The Power Plant Men reading this post at this point are quite lost about what I’m talking about. At the plant, the equivalent “Keys to the Kingdom” has a much different meaning. We had things we called Key Cabinets. They held such coveted items as keys to the pickup trucks. Keys to the Battery rooms and keys to the back gate down by the dam. It even had a key to the portable electric generator that was stolen under the nose of Jim Stevenson back in the day. See the post: Power Plant Snitch for more information about that one.
There was one secret “Key to the Kingdom” that besides the Shift Supervisor, only the electricians, had this special Key to the Kingdom. It had a unique number stamped on each key. It was quietly given to each electrician shortly after joining the electric shop. It was never loaned to anyone. Electricians never flashed this key around or even talked about it.
The day before I left the plant in 2001, I walked into Andy Tubb’s office and held out my hand and opened it, and the key fell on the desk in front of him. I didn’t know it until a few months later when the Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring movie came out at the theater, that the key that I had coveted for 19 years made the same sound landing on the desk that the Ring of Power made when Bilbo dropped it on the floor.
Ring of Power from Lord of the Rings
Andy quickly snatched up the key and hid it away in his desk drawer as he looked around to make sure no one was watching.
Andy Tubbs
When an electrician needed to use it, they just walked up to a special gate and reached into their pocket and with their back turned against everyone else in the world they inserted their own special key into the lock hanging on the gate, and whatever gate that was held bound, was suddenly let loose! The gate would swing wide open. The electrician would then return to his truck and drive through the gateway into a frontier that was unique from the rest of the world.
I know by now that the electricians from the plant that are reading this can’t believe that I’m actually talking about this key. It was generally understood that this key was our own special secret. Well, I have my reasons, which I may reveal in a later post, but I no longer feel bound by our unspoken oath to keep our special keys a secret.
The key I’m talking about is the “Substation Key”. This one key gave a Power Plant electrician access to every substation in Oklahoma that was owned by our electric company. With it, we could drive around Oklahoma, and if we saw one of our substations, we could just pull over and unlock the gate and drive right in there. We could go into the relay house and look at all the protective relays and where the transfer trip and carrier tests were performed. We could sit in the chair and put our feet up on the desk and lean back and know that the rest of the world is out there, and we are in here! Why? Because we had the keys to the Substation Kingdom! Whatever we held bound was held bound, and whatever we let loose, was let loose.
What a lot of people don’t realize, or maybe they just don’t think about it, but most computer applications have a special key that gives you access to all sorts of things that computer program can do. You can ask it to do all sorts of things, that you might otherwise have to wait for it to do on its own, or that you might not even know it can do. As I mentioned above, it is called an API. An Application Programming Interface.
In a business environment, almost all applications have a way to contact them remotely and tell it what you want to do. So, you might write your own computer program that talks to another program in order to retrieve the information it needs from it to do the work it is designed to do. It’s often as easy as making a URL call to it like you do at the top of your browser, only it is called a URI. — Actually, now I think URIs are clumped into URLs now.
Sometimes, you can make a special call API call to an application to request all of the ways you can talk to a program, so it will return all of what are called endpoints. By playing around with these, you can find all sorts of things that aren’t normally documented about a program.
I may have mentioned this before, but once when we were moving our Expense Reporting System Concur from an application we had on our servers, to the “cloud”, I wanted to migrate everyone’s credit card numbers to the new application. Well, of course, these credit card numbers are encrypted in our Concur database. Concur wanted to charge us $30,000 to unencrypt our own credit card numbers from their system, to move it to their other system. — You heard that right. They wanted to charge us to move our own data from one of their applications to their other system.
Well. I knew that their application created files with the credit card numbers on it when it made a report where we had to send the data to our payroll to pay people back for their expenses. We also had to send a payment to the credit card companies for the charges to each card. In those files, the credit card number was visible before we encrypted it to send to the credit card companies. I figured there was a way to call the Concur application and have it extract the people with their active credit card numbers to a file.
When it came time for us to migrate the data, I had a file created with everyone and their credit cards and their open charges if there were any. While I was working with the IT person from Concur and I uploaded the file, the IT person said, “Wait, you have the decimal in the wrong place on the balances.” I realized my mistake, so I told him, “Hold on a minute.”
Then using the code I had written, I quickly changed the code that translated where the decimal point should be and reran it against our Concur application (using an API), and it created a new file for me with the correct numbers. I gave it to the IT guy, and he uploaded it into their system.
Everything was good and I didn’t think about it anymore until about 6 months later when I was at a Concur Conference in San Diego. The crowd of several hundred Concur users had just finished listening to a speaker where they had given out prizes for the attendees by drawing a name out of a hat. I won a book (did I tell you that I was lucky?). As everyone was leaving the conference room to go to their next breakout session, the head of the Consulting Managers, Leslie Hale came up to me and asked if he could talk to me for a few minutes.
I would show you Leslie’s picture, but if his LinkedIn photo is any indication, I think he prefers to remain anonymous:
Leslie Hale’s LinkedIn Photo
Looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking, he asked me, “We are all wondering how you were able to pull all the credit card numbers from Concur when they are encrypted.” I was surprised by the question, but I could tell he was concerned, because if I could decrypt the credit card numbers, then others could as well. He was asking how I could decrypt the credit card numbers.
I told Leslie that I didn’t have to decrypt them, I just asked Concur to do it for me. I told him that Concur has an API call that would extract the credit card information to a file. All I had to do was give it the correct commands and out comes all the credit card charges with all the information I needed to create a file to migrate the data to the cloud application.
I know what Leslie Hale was thinking. He was wondering if somehow, I had learned the Encryption code required to decrypt the data. — This code is actually found in the actual code of the application, and using some tricks, I could have done that if I had needed to, but it wasn’t necessary.
During my time at Dell, there was another key to the kingdom that I learned. I became quite an expert at encrypting and decrypting data. If I had access to the application code, I could usually find what I needed to encrypt or decrypt any data I wanted. I chose to hold bound what needed to be held bound and let loose what I needed to be let loose.
Back at the Power Plant, I knew that people like Larry Riley and Andy Tubbs had their own special key to the Power Plant Kingdom. These keys actually consisted of two parts. They could be made using a couple of small Allen Wrenches that were ground down flat on the end. Here are some similar keys:
Lockpicks
With a pair of these, you really do have the keys to the kingdom.
Larry Riley
Larry could walk up to any farm gate, wave his hands around as if he were a magician and “Voila!” What do you know? What had been held bound was now let loose.
