Memoirs of a Scheduler Aka Junk Yard Dog

By Andrew J. Page

This book is to my knowledge accurate although as we all know some
things get embellished with repeated telling. The company names are
not real, as well as many of the names of individuals. Those who are in it
can probably easily fi gure out who they are in this book. The story starts
with Telecommunications back in the analog and live operators plugging
in cords for local calls; then moves briefl y through Purchasing and Data
Processing with the fi rst corporate main frame; and then to scheduling.
It is more about me and my travels than it is about scheduling. The
discipline took me to some very exotic places such as Tehran, Iran;
Bergen Norway; Madrid Spain; Leyte Island; Jakarta, Dieng, Bali all in
Indonesia; and Hawaii. It is also is a chronicle of some of my very good
friends and lovers over the years. I hope all of you that read this enjoy
it as much as I have in telling it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479795338

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Precursor

E xcluding allowances, my first regular paycheck came by way of stopping hockey pucks. That was before the day of facemasks. And also far enough back that a nickel bought a comic book, a quarter got you into the double feature movies and the news reels; and you had to be about half crazy to intentionally stop frozen hard rubber missiles moving at a 90 mile an hour pace.

I married my college sweetheart, Liz, was a pretty Texas girl, she took real good care of herself and dressed impeccably. She was a dirty blond, has green eyes and a gorgeous smile. She was the valedictorian all four years in college. Hockey became a mandated spectator sport by my new boss. After we married she was a Cryptologist, which made her the primary breadwinner. I was told to quit hockey, thus I went to work for The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company a Subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph Company of America. Being able to speak that and write it without error was all that was needed to become employed by CPTCASATTCA. My duties at the outset of my career were simply to take phone orders over the phone or at the front desk for walk-ins. Everything was still analog, so the hot sellers were the kitchen wall mounted phones with a super long chord, which of course, were extra money. But what are a few extra bucks for the luxury of using, with the phone anchored in the kitchen and be able to watch All My Children and cooking lunch. Rural areas were still using multi-party lines. After a year, I graduated to chasing people who forgot to pay their bill. The office was located in Laurel Maryland, which coincidentally also has a horse racetrack.

A large majority of the delinquent bill payers were jockeys. For close to a year, I spent a good deal of time at the track and nearby low rent apartments trying to collect. If the jock happened to win that day I was fairly lucky in collecting, if they were on a losing streak it generally was just written off. I didn’t make enough back then to even consider a $2 dollar bet, but I was tempted.

My next assignment in my meteoric rise at CPTCASATTCA was to work in the back room with the hardware guys and operators. There is no telling how many times I plugged in the wrong trunk line for a long distance call, or just plain was not fast enough for some of the Operators. The racks that contained thousands of telephone wire pairs were daunting to say the least. Just as I got fairly good at what I was doing, I got moved again but this time to create something very new, so new in fact, it had not been created at that point. Being located just outside Washington DC made us the perfect location for trying to develop a system for catching extortion via phone. The thought was that politicians were faced with a new potential threat that could be delivered by telephone. While we did have an instance or two of that, the much bigger market was for harassing and obscene calls. We put our collective heads together and came up with a system based on pulse. Once we knew a line pair associated with a receiving phone number, we could tap the line to get a pulse triggered by each number dialed and have it tapped out on a tape. Unfortunately we captured all calls, but with a time for the offending call we could get the line number from the call being made, then match that with the physical location of the phone from the billing information. That also was quite a task since there were not computers that sorted data. We had to look through a lot of paper to find the call.

Interestingly enough, on the public side, the largest group of offenders were members of the medical profession. Most of those incidents were results of sour grapes over partnership splits asunder for whatever reason. Just as the accolades were coming in for our little group’s success, then my real boss decided it was time to head Southwest to Houston Texas, her hometown. Helping that decision was a stalker who was a fellow worker of hers, and a party that we hosted for my work buddies and hers. As it turned out after the drinks kept on going down some of the agency people started talking shop. One of my trusted telephone ladies was married to a member of another agency that monitored the cryptologist group. Things got a bit heated when he told everybody to shut up or he would take names. That put a real damper on things. Besides just about driving the rent a wreck truck over a cliff or two, we made it safe and sound. Interviewing in Houston for a job was like nothing I have or most likely will ever have as an experience again. I had no idea that we were still fighting the Civil War. Amazing how stupid some of us Yankees can be and I am not talking about the dreaded baseball team, in fact they are included, in those lovely bumper stickers that urge us to go home.

I landed a job with Texas Pipeline, who at the time was the biggest pipeline company in the USA. My job started as an Expeditor for the Purchasing agents who bought everything for new pipelines, compressor and pump stations, and overall maintenance equipment and material. It didn’t pay much and it wasn’t very thrilling, but it was easy work. A year later, I became a purchasing agent, and then the true benefits started rolling in, tickets to football games, hunting and fishing trips, a case of fine wine, all of it legal back then. Still the pay wasn’t great, so when the owner bought the first mainframe computer sold to a privately owned company, I got chosen to decide how to make it do the things we wanted to do with it. I started with basic positive and negative pulses, which in turn could be turned into programming. I created an automated Purchase Order Form and numbering system. Next up was an expediting program that flagged days for the coming week for calls or visits to vendors for manufacturing status and delivery dates expected for all items.

The major breadwinner traded her spurs in for the start of our family, and things got very tight. The owner of the pipeline company also was a major stockholder of one of the world’s biggest Engineering/Procurement/Construction Companies. They bought a huge IBM mainframe, but that was not what I was being traded for to do, instead it was this new fangled stuff called CPM Scheduling. Needless to say with my stalwart experience with Engineers, Designers, Procurement and Construction people, I was just the right guy. I knew it had to be since they were going to pay me more than one and half times what I was making from the Pipeline Company. CPM stands for Critical Path Method. This is based on logical relationships of activities. Activities are items of work that need to be performed. Logic ties what work is needed for one activity to another. The critical path is a string of activities which create the end date. A delay to any activity on the critical path extends the end date.

CHAPTER 2

The Actual Start

I Showed up to meet my new boss, Urban O’Brien; my life has never been the same since that fateful day. Within the first few seconds I was instructed by him to call him OB from that point on. OB was in his fifties, carrying about 40 pounds he did not need, and had a shock of white hair. He had small lips and small shoulders but a booming voice. He further stated that he knew exactly zip about CPM scheduling but it was foisted on him because his boss figured he did not have enough to do. I met my mentor, Eddie, shortly thereafter, he was about 5' 10", and he had slick coal black hair and soft brown eyes which I believe was the first things the girls noticed about him. I spent about a month with Eddie, shared war stories; all his were about his love life and sports, and mine sports and college fraternity escapades. We got along extremely well, but the only thing I really learned of value was where the girls were that punched the computer cards, among them who put out the best work, and who put out per Eddie’s criteria. I never did see OB again for another 4 years.

My first project was the Aleyeska Pipeline Project, as a Junior Scheduler, with the client being DP. The first task was to check the printouts from Data Processing against the input sheets and note any anomalies and take the batch back to the DP operators; recheck that when it came back, and then attend all meetings and take minutes. Minutes needed to be typed up and distributed within 24 hours, so finding any clerk that could use an IBM Selectric was a target. I was allowed to attend several seminars about Critical Path Scheduling along the way. Most people found those seminars, whether given by IBM or any other company who produced adapted versions, boring. For some reason the whole concept fascinated me, and still does to this day. Understanding the process of forward pass, backward pass, total float and free float is relatively simple, but for some reason even very smart Managers and Engineers think it some kind of smoke and mirrors. Closed Loop CPM means basically that all activities in a schedule are linked by logic, except for the start of the project and the finish of the project, which are the only activities which do not have a predecessor activity or successor activity linking them together. The company used IBM’s PMS IV. The only real competitor, at that time, was Mc Donald Douglas’s MSCS.

The package we bought, PMS IV, was capable of processing up to 39,303 fully resource loaded and cost loaded activities. At the time nobody ever conceived of a need for any more than that, it seemed infinite. The hardest things for me to learn were the work product of our Engineers and Designers. I did understand Specifications, Request for Quotes, Bid Tabulations, Purchase Orders, Manufacturing and shipping logistics. As it turned out it was prior work experience that was useful. Drawings on the other hand were a complete mystery to me. I needed to schedule those drawings and the various cycles they went through. Fortunately for me, I met an Engineer and two Designers at a pub we often frequented after work and we struck some agreements about sharing information. They were curious about what we were doing, and I needed to learn as much as possible of what they did. As to be expected, my gain was greater, and so were my bar bills. The biggest hurdle of all was to get people to follow schedule, and to this day schedules still are window wash and smoke and mirrors to most people in the E/P/C world. Our Engineering group was harassed by the client pretty much every day, but for some reason our little scheduling team escaped the harangue, even got a few kudos. Just as I was getting an understanding of what Process Flow Diagrams, Piping & Instrument Diagrams, Wiring Schematics, Foundation Drawings & Details, and Structural Steel Drawings were all about I got a promotion to Scheduler and shipped out to the Power Plant Group.

Before we go there, however, there were four of the biggest characters I have ever met while working on the Aleyeska project. One was an employee of DP and another was one of our own in Project Control. Project Control was yet a new name created to house Planning, Scheduling, Estimating and Cost Control folks. Barry, Mr. DP, was a frequent visitor to our Project Control area, and became one of our members of the eclectic after work drinking group. Barry was small almost mousey with a very large voice. Barry’s main goal was a bit unusual. He was fascinated with the huge insurance pay offs to those wrongly injured in automobile accidents in the USA. So much so, that he bought a beat up old car and made a concerted effort to get smashed into from behind by suddenly slamming on the breaks. Unless he got satisfaction from people calling him shit head, fuck face, or stupid cocksucker, he was never was rear-ended, or satisfied. The diabolical little Brit never got his day in court, which he constantly pissed and moaned about.

Another gent was a Cost Engineer. As ZZ Top croons there is Nothing like a Sharp Dressed Man, William was the tall dark handsome Mr. Cool. A solid six footer with a square face all in proportion and a great smile and sense of humor. The girls made a point of coming by everyday to get an eyeful, and some of the more lion hearted even tried to verbally flirt. Listening to William talk about his extracurricular activities was always amusing, and while I am sure there was added sugar spice in his tales; most likely there was a kernel or two that were from his actual experiences. He was the only man I had ever met that was sexually active with dozens of women, many who knew each other and none of them seemed to care. I fully understood one Saturday afternoon when he had three ladies in his apartment that he screwed during the same party that lasted less than six hours. I was there and couldn’t believe it. The ladies, all, who were attractive, were quite proud of it.

I occasionally had to go back to the main office at Clinton Drive to get something for someone or run errands, I usually ran into Eddie. He never changed, happy with his lot in life, and had added a bit of spice by coaching a ladies baseball team. He was full of lots of stories such as vivid details of covering for girls peeing in the weeds, after drinking vast quantities of beer. I met a friend of his named James Bond not 007, James was handsome, dark hair, and always well groomed. And he loved women and women picked up on that, just a young dynamic, man with a very vivid imagination. The three of us would always talk about topless bars, the money to be made, and the suspected fringe benefits. After a few of these sessions I met Bond for lunch and we decided to do a business plan for a topless bar in town. At the time, the only way you could get a drink in town was to have a legal private club. There were no bars in Harris County, except for those places that were a club, such as the Petroleum Club.

The only topless places were out near the airport, or a few that were totally nude which could not legally sell alcohol. Our plan was based on a several relevant facts. The first, being that there was a huge number of men working in downtown Houston that would love to have a drink or three at lunch. When we coupled that with a bevy of beautiful girls dancing topless then we most likely would draw a pretty good crowd. Over the next couple of weeks things started to gel together. We found a 3,200 square foot space on Travis Street. It had a kitchen in back, and everything was structurally in pretty good shape. We worked all the numbers, squeezed them as hard as we could, and then took the $112,000 package to a small bank that was out by the airport, but purported to be a fairly aggressive lender. Structural changes including a small stage and a center brass pole, along with knocking out some walls, were about 75% of the expense. The rest would be tied up in inventory and theme knickknacks plus advertising and licenses. To our utterly complete amazement we got funded.

I will come back to this from time to time, but the Red Baron was a club that could serve just about anything that was legal. We made a couple of rules to insure that we had the right cliental. No man could come in without a jacket and tie. They also had to have a credit card. The girls could not do drugs on the premises nor could they solicit. In the third week of business, James and I loaded up $122,000 in cash in two paper sacks, went to the bank and paid off the note.

The last was a guy that was brought on board as a Junior Scheduler; Al was recently retired from the Clear Lake Police Department, and brought a bit of a sobering, but still never ending cache of great stories. He was short, about 5' 7", but obviously strong. He was dark and pock faced, with darting caffeine driven eyes. One of the best stories was about a guy who wanted to press charges on a business buddy that shorted him on a sale of marijuana. By the time that saga was over it was hard to figure who was the dumbest of the 50 or so who got arrested and convicted.

CHAPTER 3

The True Education

I met my next boss, Tom, in his office, and he had just been promoted to Senior Scheduler, yet another new job title. Tom was blond, about 6' and had blue eyes. He had long legs and big feet and did not weigh more than 165 ponds dripping wet. We hit it off really well from the outset. My job was to scrub logic diagrams, paying most attention to Engineering & Design. He took care of Construction. Our project was a coal-fired power plant the client was South Power & Light. Don, the Project Manager, was happy to have us, but only because the client was a firm believer in Project Control. I was stationed on a drafting table, movable cross bar and provided with templates with circles. Our logic diagrams were made in I J format. The other format out there was Precedence. The primary difference to the two is I J is displayed with a node (circle) on the front and back of a line. Precedence is simply a box where the front of the box is the start and the end of the box is the finish. The line in I J and the inside of the box in Precedence is the activity. Precedence only has one identifier. In both cases the start and finish of the activities are a point in time.

Back to SP&L and the power plant project. Tom and I updated the schedules with narrative on a weekly basis. As the project progressed, the critical path started running through Instrumentation design; and then back through Civil/Structural design. The control system was a Honeywell behemoth that took up a whole floor of the administration building and was the programmed Local Control for the turbines, generators, boiler and many of the various systems pumps and valves. Instrumentation is most often at the tail end of design on an industrial project. Civil/Structural works are the first things that are done in construction. After about 5 weeks of updating the schedule and writing narratives, describing the overall slip of a week for every week spent; the client finally woke up.

Late on a Friday afternoon our Project Manager walked into Tom’s office, called me in, and then asked us how sure we were of what we were reporting. I had spent several hours with our Instrument Engineer and Instrument Designers. We also had gone to the Civil/Structural guys to be sure that they were being held up by Honeywell and the Instrument design. They assured me that this was the case. Don then informed us that on the following Monday we would be going to the clients office to put on a presentation. SP&L purchased the Honeywell controls and was responsible for providing us with all the vendor data that Honeywell provided them. Our Instrument folks were complaining, likewise our Civil/Structural folks. The cause of the delay belonged to our client and his vendor. We printed several copies of the schedule reports and made sepia blue line copies of the logic diagrams depicting the critical path.

We arrived at the South Power site at mid afternoon, and were informed that we would be having dinner with the SP&L Project Manager. We met at a fairly swanky restaurant and realized quickly that this gentleman was more interested in drinking than eating. He also was a basketball fan. I had the unfortunate seat directly across from him. I know we did not discuss work that evening, but beside basketball couldn’t be sure what we talked about. It was about midnight before we got back to the hotel, and we had an 8:00 am meeting the following morning to discuss the schedule.

I had one of the worst hangovers I have ever had that morning, and I have had some doozies. Tom was supposed to lead the discussion, but he was a basket case as was the client’s Project Manager. I walked through the critical path diagram and then asked if there were any questions. The two SP&L guys in the meeting who were responsible for the Honeywell gear and drawings said that the schedule was wrong, and there was no way that they could be screwing up the Civil/Structural design. My response was quick, we did not know how much floor space we needed, how to anchor the unit and how much A/C we needed which gets into how much ducting and forced cold air we needed. As soon as I finished, the SP&L Project Manager said he had heard enough and the meeting was over. He thanked me and our team, and then turned to his people and said gruffly that they needed to stay and had a lot of explaining to do about how this got out of control schedule wise.

After the flight took off the stewardess came back to our seats and told us that our Project Manager had informed her that he would cover any beverage costs we had during the flight. Needless to say the hair of the dog had us flying well enough that we probably didn’t need the plane. What we were not aware of, until the next morning, that had we not been successful, then the company would have lost the project, including the lion’s share which is construction. A couple of hundred million dollars on the line, and we did not know it. The next afternoon our Project Manager called us into his office. He said that as long as our work was done on time; he did not care how much time we spent in the office. He offered that reward for our efforts.

That gave me some time to spend with another power plant Project Controller, who was a Native American Indian and one of the founders of CPM with the Navy. Walt was a real character, but knew more about integrated project control than anyone else in our company and probably anyone anywhere. He has coal black eyes and believed strongly in ESP and the supernatural. I learned about earned value long before anyone had a clue what it was or how to use it. My deal with Walt was simple. I would do his grunt work if he would teach me everything he knew about Project Control. Earned value is a calculation of physical percent complete times the budget. The result is a value which is less than the budget unless the item budgeted is a 100% complete. Man hours can be measured for productivity and dollars for cost efficiency. In both cases a budget is needed, a physical percent complete and actual man hours and/or dollars spent.

Productivity is measured by comparing earned man hours with actual man hours. Cost efficiency is earned dollars versus spent. You got more done than budgeted and that is good productivity. You spent less than were expected for the work done and that is cost efficiency. Conversely if you spent more that you earned that is poor cost efficiency; likewise you earned less man hours than you spent is poor productivity. These factors can be used to trend man hour budgets and cost, against the remaining budget. We did not do all that wonderful stuff for the SP&L project, just CPM