Cool
@slacktide, didn’t know they did that.
Around here we had the mixed Amoco / Standard signage seen in the photo in the comments thread of that article at some Amoco stations. Chevron was rarely seen here.
I ended up spending a lot of time at Chevron’s facility in Walnut Creek out on the other side of the bay in the SF area. They had a teleconferencing system doing very odd things that we finally nailed down to some code issues combined with a weird electrical problem.
Two interesting things from working with them there. They had a huge over-the-road bus sized RV outfitted as one of the first mobile communications and incident command center vehicles I had ever seen in that size. Way before it became popular for every government agency on every other block to own one of the million dollar or more behemoths.
Supposedly they had contacted the military and had gotten permission to use USAF transports to take it places for oil spills, natural disasters that affected company facilities like refineries, etc, etc, etc.
Only problem was, nobody asked how they should distribute the weight inside the thing and balance it. It never met the W&B requirements of any military transport, and the multimillion dollar bus mostly sat parked under an overhang leading to a loading dock at the Walnut Creek facility. Once in a while they’d drive it places for PR events, but if it had to go cross-country, it was driven there. Telecom guys said it hadn’t moved in years other than being parked at a few oil company sponsored golf tournaments. Haha.
Satellite dish on top (this was C-band days for TV uplinks and Ka/Ku was available on top of it also but wasn’t too useful for anything they said, at the time), phone key system/PBX on board, long before Internet was anything but modems but it had a coupe of those, and a couple of PCs... and a satellite and land line fax machine. Mmmmm boy, high tech for the day. Also had a fridge and a storage area for safety gear and small bunked sleeping area...
Anyway, that isn’t as much fun as...
The entire west coast music on hold feed for Chevron corporate offices was fed out of the Walnut Creek facility at the time. They had a bunch of licensed crappy music and once in a while on Friday night working late, since there was a speaker always playing the music on hold audio (usually turned way down, because it was boring) into the telecom raised floor equipment room and another speaker with its own volume in the quieter work/desk area behind the glass that overlooked the switchroom, they’d sneak a few of whatever CD anyone working wanted to listen to into the fancy brand new carousel 6 CD changer (oooooh! High tech back then!).
We are wrapping up one Friday night and I had done some after hours software updates to finish off what turned out to be the last trip there (we weren’t sure if there was still something going on electrically in the building that was causing call quality issues, but we thought it was done and the code update fixed the last bug on that side of things, so I was headed home Saturday morning...)...
One guy wants Jimmy Buffett. Cool, no problem there. He slaps in a multi CD set of two of Jimmy and I don’t even recall what got put in the other four disc slots, but all the licensed “Musak” crap was stacked neatly next to the changer awaiting re-installation and return to corporate boredom on all the phones on the west coast before we left that night.
We’re all talking and finishing up the software update and I’m packing up the tool bag and such, and the manager comes out and says hi and thanks and all the usual “maybe see you someday again, nice to have a beer with you” stuff you say to the Field Engineer... and he goes into the office space on the other side of the glass. The on site engineer for telecom and I go over the notes about the software change, and we are talking and all of a sudden the telecom manager comes running at full speed yelling “Stop the CD player! Stop the CD player!” As he’s running across the raised tile floor.
He’s coming at such a high rate of speed and the CD player is in a rack about six feet behind where my equipment is installed in a fairly open area of the floor, so we just stay out of his way as he runs for it. If we had tried to go over there we would have all had a massive collison as this guy “slid into home plate standing up”. It was an open rack, so he just mashes the eject button and out comes the entire tray and the music stops.
But what we had heard a little bit of right before he got there was good ol’ Jimmy, singing one of his quite popular songs, to all the people on hold throughout almost every Chevron business office in California...
“Whyyyyy, don’t we get drunk, and screw????”
The manager looked at us (it was the senior telecom engineer who wanted Jimmy, and these were all personal music CDs, I think he walked out to his car to get those two...) and we both doubled over laughing realizing the song wasn’t exactly on the first go-around of the chorus... and then he doubled over laughing, too.
And that’s how I was an innocent bystander while Chevron played a song to everyone on hold on the west coast about getting drunk and screwing. LOL.
During that week I also remember seeing my very first play-by-the-hour “laser tag” place in a strip mall along some main drag in Walnut Creek. Brand new tech. Had to strap on a pile of NiCD batteries and the gun was huge... never really saw it again for a couple of years until it became a “big thing” everywhere and kids were all playing it. Didn’t get to go to the one in Walnut Creek, but it was early early tech stuff they had.
They had a big old Sony tube TV in the front window displaying people running around in the dark with these 15 or 20 pound strings of electronic stuff and straps, shooting at each other from behind black painted plywood cut outs and mazes. I watched amazed for a couple of minutes and then had to hop in the rental car and head to the hotel.
Hope those old telecom guys got retired and out of that biz before it went all weird for Chevron and everyone else. Still laugh about the panic look on that manager’s face as he came running across the open raised tile floor and laughing our butts off afterward.
Bought those guys a few more beers and another dinner than we usually did for customers on a site visit that evening before crashing at the hotel to catch a morning flight home out of Oakland. One of the more fun customer site trips in my Field Engineering days. God, the traffic was bad, even back then.
