Five Years At HP -- The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly :)

Five Years At HP -- The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly :)

Note: these will likely only make sense to those who were there. I wrote these in 2005, after working five years at HP's Roseville facility, where we manufactured high-end supercomputers for North American region and the world. I am not sure I even remember the details of them all, anymore.

The weirdest thing about leaving HP along with 15,000 others, that year: the concurrent e-mails prompting me to select a five-year HP Product Service Award Gift. :o) I still have the crystal  planar bowl, somewhere, in Wisconsin.

First: The Bad and the Ugly

• Me: “Hey Darryl, I need one more code release, just one more man....” ;)
• prdmbpa:/var/opt/bp/home/mbpbat DEFR
• Andy Taff/Su Chu/and so forth: “Hey Kevin, I need a SolConfig set-up done by this afternoon for proto picks....” ;)
• Suky: “Hey Kevin, can you help me out with these fifteen P1 BLT tickets in the queue?” ;)
• You overpaid me by HOW much??? :P
• Mostly irrelevant but compulsory organizational meetings ;)
• Voice-mail: “Hi this is Kevin Schultz at the New HP....”
• Bonuses section of Carly earnings announcement: “You’ve all worked very hard. However, <$lame_excuse>”
• (sfadmin:pts/0) cab01:/var/opt/sf/home/sfadmin/voltest/bin> ./VolTestMain -i2k
• Order Execution team during ESG07a Rel 5: “Kevin, Frank wants to volume test some test picks tonight to test the backflush code, could you be available?” ;)
• Houston folks, ESG07a Rel 5, one week into testing: “Hey Kevin, did we need to set-up inventory for test orders flowing through MBP?”
• Operating on not enough sleep from the Houston hotel room during ESG07a Rel 5 volume testing: “Whoops, I just set all test orders in development backplane to BPCO.” x_x
• Roseville War Room during ESG07a Rel 5: co-worker starts singing (whining) along to music and not realizing it because music was turned up too loud.  Said person eventually ended up blowing out the iPod ear buds. :P
• Overhearing Kurt’s daily soccer and on-line role-playing-game teleconference ;)
• Don Bowen, talking to us in the RP cafeteria: “There’s a rumor they’re moving the factory to Houston....”
• Cliff Henson, during site closure announcement, after answering 2 questions and telling people they just lost their jobs: “I think all your questions are answered on this handout and y’all should go back and read it.  Thank you.”
• Dysfunctional management: Cliff Henson, Robert Sharpe, C. Kevin Harper, Charlie “The beatings will continue until morale improves” Baugh, David Witt (others....)
• TeamPlayer (TimeWaster) 
• Porting sfweb to Oracle (awk/sed/ksh/TCL/remsh/chicken-wire/weboor)
• Non-productive interruptions inherent with cubicle office environment
• Sean: Zebra printer noise -- *whiiiiiine* *cut*
• HP laying off folks right before the winter holidays in 2002.
• On the job for a week or two and watching security walk your co-worker/friend out the door. :P  (Yes, I know now why y’all fired him) ;)
• Huddling around RP ceiling speakers to hear quarterly earnings announcements
• Sitting across cubicle wall from Don Conner at RP and listening to him record voice-mail greetings until he got it right ;)
• Robert Sharpe bringing the wireless telephone headset into the bathroom.  Wild.
• That squeaky cart wheeled slowly down the hallway in R4.  *squeak* *squeak* *squeak*
• The alarm bell of the door in the corner of R4 going off for 10 minutes. *ringggggggggg*
• Cell-phone ring-tones going off for 30 seconds with no one around ;)
• Piercingly shrill SAP support pager going off but slow response because the wearer wears headphones.  :P
• Sitting across R4 cubicle wall from someone who hung their phone headset on the vertical cubicle connecter.  *clink* *clink* *clink* .... :P

All's Well That End's Well: The Good

• Kurt’s stories. “Party foul” :)  Also one of the few people I know to have a saying, “Pull a Kurt.” :)  Too much about Kurt to list here. “Dude!” ;)
• Lieu Nguyen: Surviving serious illness, and handling stress so peacefully
• Dave Horowitz’s hockey stories
• Trivia at TGIF
• Basketball at RP
• RP Follies
• Jim Behrens: Chupacabra :)
• Monthly team birthday lunches (thanks Jewel)
• Jay: Hospitality and can-do attitude
• Chris Bell: Not being an absentee dad
• Kindness and maturity of Indian contractors I worked with during ESG07a Rel 5.
• Trent: “Wag monk”
• John: “You can always tell if someone washes their car themselves by looking for dirt on the rims” ;)
• Julie: Beach Buddy ;)
• Doug Walters: Duct tape :)
• Mary Kay Kane yelling: “Hey everybody! .... Happy birthday, to you....”
• The Phantom Glenn Thomas, for having a protocol regarding the invocation of his name. :)
• Alex Ulbrich: stories about life as a private investigator, rolling out of a moving vehicle at night to gather intelligence on potential insurance abusers. LOL
• Naeya: for her grace and for making fantastic Halloween costumes
• Kathy: Standing up for me
• Mike: TCL ;)
• Mila Congrove (SI): Positive attitude and I loved her accent :)
• Cecilia, Jackie, Chris, Terri, and Ken (Sodexho): Super bean and rice, or rice bowl with veggies.  And the black cook from RP who told me I could drive to LA on Hwy 99 in five hours.  Even after I tried it and failed to do so, he claimed he could do it. :)
• Sodexho’s vanilla bean yogurt (my favorite)
• Kris: battling through arm problems.  She had a note above her desk at RP quoting either Bill or Dave: “If anyone ships defective product to meet a deadline, I will personally fire them” (paraphrase).
• Julia: taking care of all those animals, tirelessly helping out, always pleasant to chat with
• DC: “I never thought I could get soaking wet in 5 seconds while running in the rain from my car to the entrance to a shopping mall until I moved to Houston” ;)
• Tom: That dog won’t hunt. :)
• Osamu Hayashi (Hayashi-san): Kevin-san. :)
• Suky: “Oh my gosh!” :)  Thanks for teaching me about The Tube. :)
• Budd: future executive vice-president, I tell you ;)
• Noeli: Introducing me to Marisa Monte and other Brazilian music, and being a friend during ESG07a Rel 5.  Ate mais!
• Countless kindness of everybody on the team.  Thanks for giving me a chance.  I’ll definitely let you know where I end up.