Chapter 20 PPCo Surface Mapping

I hung out with the Surface Mapping Group my first few years at Phillips. It was my assignment at R&D to give them R&D support in Remote Sensing. I used their image analysis system in the old bank vault quite a bit. There were a number of people I remember, techs mainly. Richard, I think his name was, was the main computer tech, he ran the system loaded the old imagery tapes and wrote our processed images to film for us. He had another assistant, a local cowboy type who worked a farm/ranch down south of town. I borrowed a bunch of hay bales from him on autumn to deck out my garage for a Halloween party. A very nice guy. We had a few beers together at least once. There was an Osage gal, I think her name was Carolyn. She was in her late 30's early 40's. A motherly type. A matronly broad, in both senses of the word. She was great fun. I used to make eyes at this lovely young woman who was also Osage, just a gorgeous example of a native American woman. She seemed to always were these tight jeans... Anyway Carolyn noticed me looking and we got to talking, something we did a lot. Conversation came around to the other gal and she laughed. She said you think she's pretty. I had to admit she was. She pulled out a photograph and said, what about her? I looked at the photo and had to admit the gal in the picture was a knockout. Long black hair, athletic build, very pretty. The spitting image of the other younger woman. I looked up at her expecting her to say with a fair amount of pride that it was her daughter. She said simply, that a picture of me. I did a double take. She laughed again, then explained to me what she called the Osage Blossom. I didn't know what the hell she was talking about. Remember this is straight from her. It seems that in her opinion there is this thing that happens to the women of the Osage, that is genetically coded in them somewhere. In their mid-thirties, their bottoms just begin to "blossom", hence the name. Carolyn had this profound derriere. She maintained that it happened to them all. At some point she told me, that lithe, slender athletic Indian maiden I lusted after would look just like her. Carolyn was not unattractive, she was typical Osage. Round face, sepia colored skin, wonderful smile, dark brown to black hair that she kept cut to her shoulders. And she had a very ample bottom. Well, I will have to defer to her on whether the Osage Blossom really exists or not. Though I did notice that over the time I worked around the young Indian maiden I did notice that the jeans got tighter and tighter, and she did seem to be loosing that "athletic" look. I guess the only proof would be to do a representative sampling and run the statistics. There were a bunch of other characters in the group. I only remember a few of their names. Hal, Garry, Kurt, Steve, Claude, and a host of others I cannot remember. Some disappeared when the group's leader Hal, retired, and the wolves descended on the group laying off or transferring most of them. Out of over 40 odd people only about 4 survived and were moved out to R&D for a couple of years, and were finally "attritted" in the bloodletting of 1988-89. John Mihm, or as we called him, Mihm the Merciless, or Ho Chi Mihm, the head of our division led the executions. When the dust settled, I think only about 4 or 5 people remained out of a staff of over 50 including those assigned to support them at R&D. Phillips had the dubious distinction of making the deepest cuts of any oil company in the industry during the decline of the 1980's. They laid off around 50% of their geological and geophysical staff. With regard to my immediate co-workers, they were pretty much gone. Granted some were found positions in other parts of the company, but a lot left for other companies or left the industry entirely. At the time, I bailed out and got a transfer to Houston, got laid off there after 3 months, then was recalled and transferred back to Bartlesville as part of the reconstituted International Exploration Group, they had moved from Florida. That carefully thought out human resources moved cost Phillips probably around $70,000 dollars of their scarce money. They paid me two lump sums of $10,000 to move there and back in under 5 months. They paid me severance all of which I kept. They paid me living expenses for 1 month and sundry other move related monies. They did it to several other guys I am aware of, one a close friend at the time. He's an engineer and works in the Health Safety and Environment Group. Last time I spoke to him he was in charge of monitoring pipelines somewhere. They should have been laying off the dumb asses in accounting and human resources. Those clowns, it was decided had lain off too many people. In January, they moved 20 of us to Houston, then in April laid most of us off. Then recalled some of us, and moved us back to B'ville. Well thought out, right? Typical Phillips.