RaMar to Retire

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E! V OPY S I' S C LU R C E C TO E XO L L

C

Vo l . 4 8 , N o . 2 . 5 

All the news you suspected but could never prove

RAMAR TO RETIRE
NOT A SURPRISE, BUT STILL A SHOCK
INSIDE
„R  aMar writes final Pulse, runs for cover
Not an approval source in sight

„R  emembering the good old days
When we weren’t good or old

„ Retirement plans
Tune up rollerblades, buy a case of sunscreen

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Photo by Hector Peñuñuri

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A SHORT HISTORY OF PULSE EDITORS
Jan. 9, 2014 Published by Marketing & Communications Editor RaMar Orgeron (602) 236-2622 [email protected] Designer Carolyn Seay-Greeney Need to change the number of Pulses you are receiving? Employees can contact Mail Services. (602) 236-0582
Paul Selonke, editor 1967–1971 Mike Reynolds, editor 1971–1973 Judy Green, editor 1973–1973

Jeff Morris, editor 1973–1976

Marcie Smith, editor 1976–1977

RaMar Orgeron, editor 1978–present

Pulse is published weekly for employees like RaMar Orgeron, who is a big fan of Pulse. RaMar insists she reads Pulse from cover to cover every week.

CUB REPORTER BECOMES PULSE EDITOR
This unusual bit of page design served a dual purpose, introducing RaMar as the new editor of Pulse and helping her meet people in the days before eHarmony made dating so much easier for everyone.

Read Pulse early on insideSRP
The newest online issue of Pulse is ready to read by 6 a.m. every Wednesday. Go to insideSRP and click on the “Pulse” tab.

Printed on recycled paper

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JOBS SHE NEVER HAD, BUT SHOWED UP FOR ANYWAY
In her line of work, RaMar wore many different hats, although to the untrained eye they all looked like hard hats. She would show up at job sites to get a story for Pulse,
During one job along the Red Mountain Freeway, RaMar used her elevated view to study traffic patterns and better understand what causes commuters to drive like maniacs for no reason, other than that they’re all idiots.

and the next thing you know, she would be helping out with this and that. Here are photos of those times.

In 1982, RaMar briefly rode the rails at Coronado Generating Station before she realized she was going nowhere fast because she was on a railcar mover, not an actual coal train.

In 1979, RaMar went on location and started telling AV guy Dan Shook where to aim the camera. As directed, Shook took footage of the ground that RaMar used for a documentary about how the Hohokam and Jack Swilling partnered on a dirt removal project to create the Valley’s 131-mile canal system so SRP would have a place to keep its expensive collection of fish.

RaMar grew up listening to Glenn Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” and decided she, too, wanted to be a lineman for the county or the local utility, as the case may be. But she had to abandon her dream when she realized that the poles were 40 feet tall and she could never get more than 2 feet off the ground. RaMar never subscribed to SRP’s annual catch-and-relocate initiative but rather saw fish herding as a means to an end. She started the pilot No Fish Left Behind program to repurpose the fish and branded it Delivering More Than Fish Sticks.

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RAMAR TO RETIRE

Ramar Orgeron wraps up 37 years of srp
Pulse Editor RaMar Orgeron announced today that she is retiring from SRP despite the fact that she has not yet won the Powerball and won’t be leaving in a limo. “I always said I’d retire when I hit the jackpot,” RaMar said. “It was a good exit strategy, but the problem was that every time I had $2, I spent it on ice cream instead of a lottery ticket.” RaMar has been at the helm of the company’s employee newsletter since 1978, the year after she joined SRP. (What she did during that first year is anyone’s guess, but more on that later.) She estimated that she has published 444,788 issues of Pulse. That amount was later revised when she realized that was the number of acre-feet from last year’s runoff season. However, it’s true that RaMar has published more than 1,700 issues and written thousands of stories about anything and everything that has happened at SRP.

The Pulse desk in 1978, when RaMar typically proofread the issue after it was printed.

“Approval sources keep me honest, but because of them, some of my best writing has never seen the light of day.”
“Back when I joined the company, the place was overrun with engineers,” she said. “Writing a story was tough because I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.” One of her first assignments was to write about how a turbine generator works, and as any engineer can tell you, the rotor contains DC field windings supplied with DC electricity and is surrounded by armature windings, and as the magnetic field on the rotor is rotating, the 4

magnetic lines of flux cut the armature windings, inducing a voltage. She had better luck writing stories for the Water Group, since everyone knows that water runs downhill and droughts happen when it doesn’t rain. The approval process also took some getting used to. At RaMar’s previous job, with a newspaper in Wyoming, she covered politics and rodeos, and the cowboys never asked to see what she wrote before it went into print. One example of how approval sources cramped her style occurred in 1995, the year SRP employees bagged a 16% IPP, the biggest payout ever recorded. Although the IPP announcement was met with widespread rejoicing, RaMar grumbled that Compensation nixed her headline, “This year’s IPP is freakin’ awesome!” Nonetheless, RaMar has abided by the approval process ever since the fiasco in 1977, when she was editor

Who knows why RaMar was reading The Arizona Republic instead of writing Pulse, but clearly this was an exciting moment.

of the management newsletter, The Current, during her first year with Uncle Salty. “It’s amazing how much you can learn from one screw-up,” she said. “I

news coverage
won a million dollars in “The Pick” lottery. A medical claims processor won a red 944 Porsche in a radio contest. And, before the dry riverbed became Tempe Town Lake, employees competed against other corporate teams in the Salt River Submarine Race, using a 300-pound land submarine built by Mechanical C&M. “I thought writing about a utility company would be dull as dirt,” RaMar said, “but that was before the 100-year floods began.” Three monster storms resulted in runoff that filled the reservoirs and was released from dams on the Salt and Verde rivers. The resulting flows reached 264,000 cubic-feetper-second and wiped out bridges connecting Valley communities on both sides of the riverbed. RaMar was

Above, RaMar jots down another great quote that will never see the light of day. Left, RaMar puts on her “please give me the facts without all the detail” face and adds a hand gesture for emphasis.

“I thought writing about a utility company would be dull as dirt, but that was before the 100-year floods began.”
sent to Horse Mesa Dam to write a story and found herself in a helicopter with an emergency relief crew. Upon reaching Horse Mesa, Pilot Bill Hines set down on a floating pad bobbing in the choppy water above the dam. She got her first good quote of the day from Hines, who reassured his white-knuckled passengers, saying, “If you can stand on it, I can land on it.” If that didn’t convince RaMar that she indeed had an interesting job, the trip to the dam control room did. She followed an electrician down a staircase on the face of the dam, where they had a good view of the 115-kilovolt switchyard on the
Continued on Page 6
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learned how to reconcile conflicting edits, how the chain of command works and when to run screaming from the building.” She also found out which approval sources were fast and reliable but was thwarted in her efforts to make them review copy for the entire company. “Approval sources keep me honest, but because of them, some of my best writing has never seen the light of day,” she said.

Still, she found plenty of material for stories that could get approved for print. There was the disgruntled customer who paid his electric bill in cash, dropping off a bucket filled with 17,410 pennies. There was also the elderly horseback rider who clippityclopped her way to the Apache Junction business office every month to pay her bill. A Harlem Globetrotter was hired on as a meter reader. A warehouseman

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RAMAR TO RETIRE

ONWARD AND UPWARD
Continued from Page 5

powerhouse roof. Spray from the water being released was hitting the energized equipment and causing it to arc dramatically. The second profound quote came from the electrician, who, after watching the crackling field of arcing electricity, observed, “Power does not like water.” Neither quote made it into print, but RaMar, who at the time thought she was getting paid by the word, wrote enough column inches to fill up that week’s issue of Pulse. The weekly deadline kept her on her toes and kept her nose to the grindstone. Unlike previous editors, she opted to stay the course, pull rabbits out of hats and have more fun than a barrel of monkeys — although she was not allowed to write entire sentences in clichés. RaMar, who is thought to be the world’s oldest living Pulse editor, was motivated to retire because, she said, “One of my jobs is to write the obituaries, and it occurred to me that if I don’t retire, at some point I’ll find myself writing my own obituary.”

RaMar and Pulse designer Harvey Oblander. Harvey advocated more photos and less copy because, “People want to look at the pictures; they don’t want to read all this stuff that the engineers are saying.”

Also, it’s getting to the point where she can’t cram her extracurricular projects, events, and activities into just evenings and weekends. As to what she plans to do when she retires, RaMar said, “First, I’ll stop coming to work. Then, I’ll get my rollerblades tuned up and buy a case of sunscreen.”

HERE’S WHAT RAMAR SAYS WHEN PEOPLE ASK ‘WHAT WAS IT LIKE BACK IN THE DAY?’
(This is old-timer stuff, so for best results read this with a Betty White voice.) • In 1978 rotary dial phones were replaced with push-button phones that had call waiting and three-way calling. The time we saved by not having to dial we used to put people on hold. • I don’t know why no one believes this but we used to have double-digit rate increases. In 1981 we had a 12% rate increase, and mind you that was in addition to the 9% increase we had in 1979. Plus, even though this happened before my time, it’s worth noting that in 1975 SRP had two increases totaling 44%. • The PAB used to be a desert outpost with only the Phoenix Zoo to the north and the Legend City amusement park to the west. Then, in 6 1983 SRP bought 135 acres, including Legend City, and turned it into the Papago Park Center, which paved the way for us to one day have a Starbucks within walking distance of SRP headquarters. • Before there was Epic there was the Incentive Pay Plan which debuted in 1994. That first-year payout was a doozy, although we didn’t know it at the time because we didn’t have anything to compare it to. So when an old-timer says something about “the good old days” they’re talking about that 16% payout. • We produced massive amounts of paperwork using something called a “typewriter.” In wasn’t until 1981 that people began using “computerized text processing” and we all learned what happened if we didn’t “save” our work. • Once upon a time you didn’t need an ID badge to get into the building. Then in 1992, card key access was installed at the PAB and we all took turns standing outside the building waiting for someone to let us in on days when we forgot our badges and before we learned about, and got busted for, tailgating. • Please don’t raise your eyebrows or launch into a lecture when I tell you that we used to have ashtrays on our desks and we smoked while we worked. A 1986 policy signaled the beginning of the end when it was decreed that we could no longer smoke in common areas like hallways or conference rooms.

RAMAR MAKES MEMORIES THAT WE’LL NEVER LET HER FORGET

With the invention of inline skates and neon attire, RaMar was able to rollerblade to work in support of a 1980s alternative transportation campaign.

RaMar used the biggest lens she could find to take a picture of this person’s elbow.

RaMar and Mike Patrick removed tumbleweeds clogging streams and tributaries in an effort to improve runoff on the Salt and Verde watersheds. Above, no newsletter is complete without a picture of a groundbreaking. This one is special because they ran out of shovels and had to use their hands. This photo was taken in 1992, which we know because RaMar, center, was sporting a maternity frock and pregnant with her son, Cody. Left, after spending the previous evening hydrating with malt beverages, RaMar finished a 10K at CGS with the record-breaking time of 3:47:00. She held up traffic and was assisted over the finish line by her co-workers, from left, Mark Estes and Pat Denley.

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5 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT RAMAR

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Her desk has been home to pretty much every kind of bird that hatches out around PAB and then falls out of the nest. Also, when birds fly through the back door and get loose in the building she chases them down with help from Facilities Services. They used to call this Delivering More Than Doves but now it’s known as the Avian Protection Program. The biggest bird she ever helped was a peahen (that’s a lady peacock for you non-fowl folk) that flew into the ECR1 window during a meeting. Executives watched the rescue and no doubt wondered if this was some kind of a weird EPIC goal.

Over the years she’s had several nicknames. Rebar, which is also the name of the metal rods used to reinforce concrete used in power plant construction. The Pulse Princess, and no, it did not take long for her to start wearing a tiara. Dr. Orgeron, not because she was taking people’s pulses or editing copy with a scalpel, but because of her initials: Dana RaMar. RaMar was one of the first people to support “Take Your Dog To Work Day,” and even carpooled from home to the PAB with Hank, her Chocolate Labrador, before someone explained to her that the program was “Take Your Daughter To Work Day.” During a 10-year period starting in 1977, she survived four separate car crashes. After each accident she walked (or limped) away or left in an ambulance, while the car was towed to the junkyard never to be driven again. Other drivers were cited, while RaMar found replacement vehicles, collected on insurance claims and preached the gospel of wearing seat belts. RaMar collects stuff from every job site she visits. She has an insulator, underground cable, conduit, core samples from Theodore Roosevelt Dam, and the metal balls used to pulverize limestone for the NGS scrubbers. Rumor has it that she eventually may have enough material to build her own power plant. 8

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