Moyno Oilfield Products #

If there was a Holy Grail for Computer Geeks and Developers this was it. It sure was mine because it involved hardware and software and network connection, and fiber optic cabling. When I was in GMCC during one of our networking classes we were taken on a tour of the server room. One of the things that they were very proud of was that their two major servers where connected by fiber optic cabling. The whole cable was no more than 2 feet long as the two servers were sitting right beside each other. At Moyno Oilfield Products I was involved in getting all our computers that were out on the manufacturing floor were connected by fiber optic cabling. This was a set of very long cables and it was needed because there was so much interference from the electric welders.

Moyno had a manufacturing facility in Edmonton, a sales office in Calgary and about 9 field stores around the province. I was initially hired to help develop the front end for the pump test bench. They were using a software package that came out of Australia and it was sort of basic like. It was pretty easy for me to figure the language out and get this program to work the way we wanted and produce a chart. I got this job because the engineer that usually worked on this was not available, they were in Fairfield, California where they made the actual parts that we assembled in Edmonton. They did find a hardware engineer who built the test bench with all the sensors and I just had to capture the results.

I found that as the testing went to these various pressure increases that I was getting a lot of garbage data that was jumping all over the place until it stabilized. I built into the software to ignore all this garbage until it stabilized and then capture the value before moving onto the next pressure point. The engineers in Fairfield were pretty impressed with what I was accomplishing and new to this platform was doing things that their engineers hadn’t accomplished working with it for several years. They now realized there is a difference that a real software developer could bring to the table. Soon I had all kinds of software to develop and they even sent potential developers from Fairfield to Edmonton to learn from me.

I was told to not submit more than the value of a 40 hour week in a single month. I was working late many, many nights so I would have too many hours before you knew it so I would take trips to Las Vegas or Los Angeles. On one of those trips, I came home to find out that they had fired Adrian and the President of this Alberta operation. We were a sub-company of the Fairfield location which was a division of Robbins & Myers, Inc. They were spending way too much money and had gone way over the allocated budget for this startup. I warned Adrian that the money being spent was not making any sense. Adrian and I took a trip to Seattle to look at a case tool that would take requirement information and turn it into C++ code. The price to license this software was something like $10,000 to $20,000. It wasn’t that impressive but it was that kind of thing that was going on.

They brought in a new President to run the day to day and get things back in line and I was the sole IT guy. I was now responsible for all the servers at the Edmonton Plant which was my office and all the sales and field offices. I would take the company car and visit all the field stores a couple of times a year to upgrade any hardware and software and otherwise worked on software enhancements and kept things going. One of the roles was to support the field stores that were running these test benches and sometimes the results were not what they were expecting. This was my first encounter were I realized people might actually not tell me the full truth when I am trying to help them. I would ask them what filters that they were using on the data and they would almost always say they were not using any and I could not believe that. I then found a way that I could tell what the filters were by using a little bit of binary math. This was something that I learned in college but was always fascinated that in an alert box I could decorate it with a bunch of features all in a single parameter. The features we all value strings that you would string together like alter+ok+cancel and that would give me an alert with a big exclamation icon and two buttons. Each string had a value when added together could only result in these specific features.

That was the logic that I used to resolve my chart filter problem. I would add the filter elements together and that number I would print on the bottom of the report. It looked like a form version number. I would then ask them for this number when they called in to get some support on the output of the chart. I would enter the number from the report into a special program that I put together and from that number would display exactly which filters were turned on. Now I could tell them what to do to fix up the output of the report.

Things were going well I was using the network stills I learned in College, putting my programming stills to work and they treated me so well there. Once a month I would present them with an invoice and by 4:00 pm the same day I got a check. Once a week I would send a spreadsheet of all the things I was working on to my new manager who was now out of Houston, Texas from an acquisition, that I had never met. Then one Friday night coming back from one of my tours of the field stores I see that there is an urgent telephone message on my phone to call my Huston manager right away.

On that call he informed me that they wanted to change the terms of my contract from a 40 hour a week to a maintenance only contract which would have meant something like 10 to 12 hours a month. This was early fall and we had two mild winters in a row were I didn’t were anything more than a jean jacket and everyone knew that this next winter season would be brutal. I would either have to invest in some winter clothes or move to a more winter friendly location. I had been working on this job for almost a year and was the closest to a full time job that I have had since leaving college so I was not taking in any other work. For the first time I could actually move somewhere else. It did not take me long to decide where that somewhere else was going to be be. I have been wanting to move to California since I was 16 years old. I had been back there many, many times for vacations but now I had a chance to make a move.