Maybe I'd better give you 'The Rest of the Story'.....

When I worked at that 'Snivel Service' job in Ottawa in the mid-sixties, I'd been hired, as mentioned, because they had never had anyone in  the office there who knew what they were doing in an actual operating situation in a real power station. And Joe, our Manager of Hydro Stations, wanted me for that situation. And I thought it might be 'cool', as long as the real Pros didn't eat me alive. Everyone else flying a desk in there was either an Engineer, Registered Technologist, or had some other impressive qualification, like Chartered Accountant or whatever. I was the only high school dropout and 'Gold-plated Nobody' they had. I was unique. 'Unique' coming from the Latin, 'Uno' meaning 'one' and 'Equus' meaning 'horse'.

Because I lived relatively nearby to that head office, and because I wasn't always charmed to pieces by that spaghetti palace rooming house and its several upwardly-mobile young yahoos pretending they knew how, I chose to spend a lot of my free time back at the office, by myself, improving my education, and getting on with my assigned project. After my federal security clearance I had been given my own key to the office, so I could come and go as I wished, and I frequently wished. It was far more preferable than my room in the rooming house.

My 'education' at the office after hours consisted in part of a complete reading of all the Personnel Files of our major players. I knew how the outfit came into existence, why its management had been handed to a man who had no background in anything electrical - he had run an office for the old Wartime Prices and Trade Board, helping with the war efforts during WW2, and they needed somewhere to 'hide' him when that all ended - and how he in turn had set up his hierarchy here in a 'divide and conquer' pattern, with two equal subordinates, each probably hoping to succeed him if and when he retired.

And I'm working as the Executive Assistant to one of those two equal subordinates, making me the helper of one of the two 'second-in-command' guys. In actual practice, I was a multi-purpose helper for both of them, and basically their 'gopher'. When they needed or wanted something in a hurry, I was the one to 'go fer' it. I made sure the kettle was boiled for 'tea time', I went shopping for the tea and cookies, I took calls if they were out, I ran errands and messages more often than our official Office Boy, and I coordinated completion of their paperwork with the secretarial pool and the drafting department, and the accounting department on the floor below. I was a multi-purpose flunky, and I loved it. And I had my finger on the pulse of that whole outfit.......

Joe, my official boss, ran their hydro sites, and George in his next-door office behind stacks of folders, ran their diesel sites. Old Ted, that displaced leftover from WW2, sat pompously in his managerial office just inside the main foyer. Ted and I didn't have a very good relationship, partly because I'd seen his personnel files, and knew he was the least-qualified of any of us. And our relationship wasn't improved when he decided to go shopping for an understudy to be prepared to take over his position when he retired a few years hence.

There had been three original employees of this organization when it was first conceived as an operating subsidiary under Northern Affairs, and named Northern Canada Power Commission. Those three were Old Ted, George our diesel boss, and my boss Joe. Of those three, the one with the best personality, most friendly attitude, and widest set of connections around and about was my guy, Joe. Joe also had his finger on the pulse of the outfit, even moreso than our boss, Old Ted. And I naturally felt that Joe should have been the logical successor to Ted when we finally became 'Dinosaur Free'. But Ted had other ideas. And he and I locked horns over it. We 'kissed and made up' later on, but relations were definitely strained for months.

Ted went to an outfit in Montreal named 'Montreal Engineering', makers of hydro turbines, and etc., and hired a hot-shot Engineer from them. This guy was installed in a newly-created front wall office right next to Ted's. The existing two 'second-in-command' offices and mine were further along that end of the building. My boss Joe had the corner office on the street side's western wall, and George had one along that west wall, immediately next to Joe's. Mine was the cubicle in that corner, between those. And beside mine was the secretarial pool. So we were all along the front of the floor, close to Mission Control, which was a big old clattering teletype machine beside Ted's Executive Secretary's desk near the front entrance. And being the executive 'gopher', inevitably one day I get summoned into new guy's office. Oh, Joy!

He looked me up and down, noticed the black leather patches on the elbows of my red & black sports coat, and asked "How long have you been here?" I replied, "Longer than you, why?" He asked, "What are you, the resident smart-ass?" I said, "Yes Sir! That's my main specialty, and I'm goddamned good at it." Then he asked me what I'd done before I came here. I said, "Eight years Ontario Hydro as a hydro-electric power station operator, and five years Great Lakes Power Company as a jack-of-all-trades operations and maintenance man, also in hydro plants, including some we controlled remotely from a main station." Then he asked me if I had heard of Montreal Engineering. I said, "Yes Sir. You're the guys who have been giving my nice old Uncle Frank at Great Lakes Power such a hard time over that faulty 50-megawatt unit's turbine that you supplied for our unit number three at our main station on the Montreal River at Mile 92 on the ACR, north of Sault Ste. Marie, and we really wish you guys would get your act together and stop trying to screw us into the ground!"

He said....(Never mind what he said....it's censored!) Then, after that, he said "So you're from Great Lakes Power!" And I said, "Yes! When the shit hit the fan there, I was the guy who jumped out of bed and got the lights back on for Uncle Frank, why?" And he said, "Well, I'll be goddamned! You and I probably aren't going to get along very well, I can see that." And I said, "That all depends..." And he asked "What do you mean?" So I said, "I mean that if you barge in here among an old established hierarchy like this one, where everyone practically grew up with the outfit - your two second-in-commands here are founding fathers of it - and you try coming on like gangbusters, you're going to get the shock of your sweet young life, Kid. So take a hint - put away that oversize ego and try harder to act like an honest-to-God human being, because we have our ways here, and you don't want to sample those, trust me!"

The next day, as Joe and I were comparing notes in his corner office, Joe asked "Have you met that new guy yet?" I asked, "You mean that Prize Prick from Montreal?" Joe smiled, and nodded 'yes'. I said, "Yes, I have.....I gave him his Spring Tuneup yesterday...." Joe said, "Let's go to lunch! - I'm buying!"