Family Legacy with John Gribble

Consumers Energy has always been known as a great place to work.  In fact there are generations of families that have worked here.  Listen as John Gribble discusses his work at the company and the legacy of his father.

Transcript

William Krieger:  The views and opinions of the guests of the "Me You Us" podcast do not represent the views and opinions of Consumers Energy.

[background music]

Bill:  Hello, everyone, and welcome to Me You Us, a well‑being podcast. It's another well‑being Wednesday here at Consumers Energy, and I'm your host Bill Krieger. Today my guest is John Gribble. He is the database platform owner here at Consumers Energy.

John, if you'd introduce yourself, we'll get the conversation started.

John Gribble:  Thank you, Bill, appreciate you having me here today. My name is John Gribble. I have worked for the company twice. I started in 1985. I worked for seven years, did various mainframe work then.

I left for three. Then I came back. I worked in performance and capacity. Then I worked in storage. Then I worked in backup. Then I worked in server administration. Now, I am the database platform owner here at Consumers.

Bill:  It sounds like you might know a thing or two about IT. I'm not sure.

John:  A little, here and there.

[laughter]

Bill:  Absolutely. For myself, really, and for the audience, as a database platform owner, what do you do for a living?

John:  My biggest duties are to ensure that we're using the right databases for the right applications, and we're looking at everything on a whole.

My DBAs are engineers, their operations. We design them. We build them. We operate them. We ensure that they have backups. That they have disaster recovery capabilities. We ensure that your data is going to be there when you need it.

Bill:  I think that something that might be interesting about Consumers Energy, as opposed to maybe some other large companies, is we don't farm that stuff out. That's all in‑house. Is that typical?

John:  There are support people that I had that worked for me that are CE employees. I do have HCL contractors. We have the capability of having other contractors. Today, at the time of this recording, I should say, we only have three databases that are not in Consumers Energy data centers.

We have three of them that are in the cloud in Azure. That's a way of farming them out. Those are what we call Platform‑as‑a‑Service database. We tell Microsoft Azure that we want a database. We want it to have this address. This is the type of data that it's going to be.

They provide all the infrastructure and the behind‑the‑scenes activities that we would normally provide. Those are very, very small databases, and provide certain value to those clients, but they're not like an SAP database or an ADMS database, at least not today.

Bill:  If I'm not mistaken, if you were to visit what I've heard referred to as a server farm, it's a pretty awesome thing to see. It's a sight to behold.

John:  Consumers Energy is a medium‑sized server farm, I'm going to say. We have approximately 4,000 virtual servers today. I have worked with other companies and other individuals that have 10 to 20,000 in the same physical room. All it is is rows and rows and racks and racks of equipment.

It's not like in the old days where you would actually write a program to make the lights light up and certain patterns to say hello to a visiting dignitary or whatever. There's nothing like that today. It's been toned down and lost all that fanciness.

Bill:  Like the matrix, then.

[laughter]

Bill:  Maybe

John:  Much smaller than all those tubes, I should.

Bill:  Lots of air conditioning still, though, I would imagine to keep things cool.

John:  Yes. Computers do love their cool air. That's for sure.

Bill:  They do. Even my computer at home will complain if I'm not taking good care of it. What interested you in working in IT, information technology, and technology in general?

The audience can't see you, but your face lights up. Even before we started recording the podcast, when we started talking about technology, there's this glimmer that comes to your eye. It seems to me that you enjoy what you do.

John:  I do. I really do. I always have. I've always been the tinkerer, if you will, of some sort. When I was in high school, I was in that series of classes, six weeks here, six weeks there, six weeks there.

I got into that computer class where we had a PET computer; had a little tiny four‑inch screen, and a keyboard, and a little cassette tape recorder attached to it, and that's where you stored your programs.

I did the whole six‑week class in about a week. The teacher couldn't believe me and I'm showing him all the things that I did, he goes, "Let me see if I can find you something else to do."

The next thing I know for the next five weeks and the next six weeks after that, because they changed my schedule so I could work on some teachers PET projects, I was doing work for all the teachers in the school, doing little things on the PET computer that they could then do things for them.

That caused my dad to say, "What are you going to do with your life?" He says, "You're going to be an engineer like me?" I said, "I'm not thinking that way." They had had an interesting presentation from the IT Technical Institute, where you go and you school for 18 months, and you become this computer person or whatever.

I was interested in that. He talked me out of it, and he talked me into going to college. My first semester, for Christmas he bought me a TRS‑80 color computer. That was the most expensive Christmas gift I ever had. I quickly learned how to upgrade it, and manipulate it, and make it not a simple eight‑bit system, but I tripled the memory.

I added an external disk drive. I was doing all these things, and I felt like there wasn't anything that I couldn't do. Actually, did a little project for my mother to record...She was part of the Woman City Club and she was the reservation person.

She would put in the reservations into the computer, and I would print out, this little four‑inch wide little printer I had, and I color coded it with a different letter having a different color to print so she could easily distinguish between the people, and she could quickly find them and check them off whether they had paid or not.

Some lady who owned a business here in town invited me to her house to do some work for her, and she gave me a rather expensive tip and I thought, "I can make money at this?"

[laughter]

Bill:  You're just doing this for fun right now...

[crosstalk]

Bill:  ...someone is going to pay me.

John:  Yeah, I was. It was just fun and I found out I could make money doing it, too. It's something I've always enjoyed and taken too.

Bill:  I want to back up a little bit because you mentioned the TRS‑80 computer. That immediately elicited these memories of when I was in junior high and just starting high school.

Me and my buddies would hop on our bikes in the summertime. We would ride up to the local RadioShack, and we would get our free battery because we belong to the [laughs] Battery Club if you remember that.

John:  I do.

Bill:  They had a TRS‑80. It wasn't the fancy color version, it was the monochrome. We would sit there until they threw us out of the store, just fascinated by this computer. We didn't own computers. The other thing was, like you said, your dad talked you out of going to the computer school.

John:  IT Tech.

Bill:  IT Tech because I think at the time it was, people weren't sure, is this just a fad or is this something that's going to take off when it comes to personal computing?

John:  That IT Technical Institute, there were several times that I've thought back that if I had done that instead of going to college for four years, how would my life have been different? I ended up running into a person who I went to high school with who did do that, and in the long run, I ended up being better off. I was happy.

Don't get me wrong, he had some wonderful things that he had done, but he was constantly jumping from company to company to company to do work for them. I've had the great fortune of working for this company now twice, and another good company in between. I'm glad the way I went.

Bill:  I'm a believer in that things happen for a reason. Everything we do brings us to the point in time where we're at.

Let's go back a little bit, though. You've worked for the company a couple of times. I like to say some of our greatest assets have left and come back. I only say that because I left for a short period of time and came back as well.

[laughter]

Bill:  I went on active duty in the army a couple of times, but came back. Let's talk about it. You came to work here in June of 1985. You were here, you said, for five years.

John:  It was seven years in the company's terms. There was a huge layoff in 1991, where half the IT department got cut. I was not one of those people, but I was the first one to leave after that. They were actually talking about more layoffs. I had three young kids at home. I wanted to make sure that I had a way of providing for them.

Some of the other people that had gotten laid off that I knew and were friends, they were struggling to find a job. There was a depression going on in Michigan a little bit at that time. I think everybody found jobs that wanted them, but some of them had to go a long way. I ended up going all the way to San Antonio, Texas.

Bill:  Wow.

John:  It was a big jump. There wasn't a lot available. I kept running into, "We'd love to have you, but there's a hiring freeze. We can't give you a job or whatever until later on in the year because of this financial thing we're at." It was a bad time.

I started to open it up and looking for a greater area. I read this article in one of the trade magazines at the time because there wasn't an Internet. You only had the magazines.

Bill:  Let's hang on for a second, and listen, think of this, folks. If you needed to know something, you didn't Google it. If you were looking to apply to a job, that was picking up something that was printed on paper.

John:  Yes. Absolutely.

Bill:  Then picking up this thing called a telephone that was connected to your house.

John:  [laughs]

Bill:  A completely different era. I remember that time frame. I was actually in the military at the time. I didn't have the same struggles that maybe other folks had, but I know the time frame you're talking about. No one was hiring.

John:  What was interesting was these magazines, you get them as a group. It comes to one person, then it goes to that person, and then that person. You rotate the magazine around the entire group. I'm looking at this position posting in the trade magazine. I'm, "Oh, that's me to a T."

Then I looked and the magazine was three months old. I was the last one to get this, [indecipherable 13:18] . Then I started going to everybody's office ‑‑ we had true offices back then; we actually had two people in an office unless you were a supervisor ‑‑ and I found the most current magazine.

I said, "Can I borrow this?" "Yeah." I went back. Sure enough, it was still posted. You couldn't take a picture on your cell phone because you didn't have cell phones.

Bill:  [laughs]

John:  I took it down to the copier machine. I made a copy of it, went home. I made another copy of my resume. I mailed it off. Two weeks later, my wife was off doing...I think she was doing Pampered Chef at the time, where she was a Pampered Chef consultant. Out of the house at night. I had the three kids.

The phone rings. It's USAA. They want to have a job interview. I said, "OK. I don't mind doing the job interview, but I got three kids. One of them's a little one. If he starts crying, we got to put this on hold." He goes, "Hey, I'm in the same boat. No problem."

[laughter]

John:  The interview took two and a half hours because we had to keep getting interrupted by our kids. I went down there. It was a huge leap in technology because USAA's primary business was insurance for military officers, retired, and their children.

The key is they don't have an office in every place all over the country. They have, at the time, I think six offices. That was it. They were in North Oak, in Colorado Springs, in San Antonio, one in I think Sacramento.

Anyway. Everything had to be perfect. You had to have systems that delivered fantastic usability for a person that was only going to get paper. They didn't even have electronic systems then.

The Internet was just being invented. People had 300 baud modems and 14400 baud modems. By today's technology, the slowest DSL connection is still so many times faster than that.

Bill:  That elicits another memory, too. I wish I had a recording of that sound when you're doing your dialogue.

John:  [high‑pitched sound] [laughs]

Bill:  Yeah. That eerie, weird sound. Anyone that ever watched "WarGames" will know what I'm talking.

John:  Yeah.

Bill:  You find yourself working for USAA, then.

John:  I really, really, really loved it. The company operated differently. Everyone that was in senior management was either a retired general, a colonel, or something. It had a very militarized environment for getting work done.

The thing that changed my mind and why I left was it was too far away from family. My wife's family and my family are both in the Jackson area. It got to be too much. I won't dive into all the details.

I did have a mother‑in‑law whose grandchildren that I had were her first grandchildren. She missed them terribly. She visited 15 times in those three years. It was a good time.

A gentleman by the name of Jerry Harris, who I went to high school with his daughter and I shared an office with at Consumers the first time, he was down for a conference in San Antonio for the company.

He called me up on the phone. He goes, "Hey, I remember you're down here. I brought Carol, my wife. You want to get together and have dinner?" We did. He said, "Things have really changed at Consumers. IT is becoming important again. It wasn't like it was in '91 when they cut half the IT department. I think they got a position that's just perfect for you."

I asked him about the position. I asked who the team lead was, who I knew. I called Doug on the phone. We spoke for 45 minutes. I had a call that evening from a person they had at that time called a coach. Her name was Jackie.

They called me the next morning with a offer, said come home. You're a known commodity. We want you back. The rest is history. I've been back ever since, and just been wonderful.

Bill:  When we think about technology...I got to Consumers Energy in 1994. I've watched the technology transformation and explosion that's happened at Consumers Energy. When you say we've changed the direction of how we're viewing technology an IT, it couldn't be more true.

John:  Absolutely. We had that mainframe environment in '91, '94. It was what they called big, monolithic iron. You ran your entire business on that. That was fine. It worked well. There are still companies that are using them today.

I remember the customer record system at that time. If you wanted to make a change, the estimate started out at 1,500 hours. That was to start. Then you went up from there. It just got to be a little bit too expensive to maintain those systems.

That started the process around that time to start looking at how can we do it better? We ended up doing a huge evaluation on many different products and ended up settling with SAP. That was going to be our first major application from start to end that wasn't going to be on the mainframe.

We had some other applications at that time that use some distributed technology like SWM at the time, SWM. To be completely off that platform, it was the first major one that we did.

Bill:  When you mentioned that, I remember working in a group called Field System Support out of Parnell office. When you talked about distributed technology, I actually worked on a project where we looked at how we could update mapping for the engineering group without having to distribute all of the maps all the time. Just distribute the changes that occurred.

That was a huge shift from how we did things in the past to how we started to do things going into the future. You mentioned that. I remember a lot of late nights and a lot of and end using testing, where is this thing going to work or is it not?

When it finally worked, it was amazing because it helped with our bandwidth. It eliminated a lot of waste. Something we didn't even talk about back then. Eliminated a ton of waste, a ton of extra things. A ton of printing things out every time. It was just an amazing way to do business.

You talk about SWM. I don't remember what the name of the system was, but I remember the system before SWM. Then I remember it changing over to SAP. I worked in electric dispatch for a while. I remember the old [indecipherable 21:31] system. Then we went to the outage management systems.

John:  Now we just left OMS. We went [indecipherable 21:39] , OMS. Now we just went to ADMS.

Bill:  Yes. I could remember the struggles of the old days under the [indecipherable 21:48] system. How OMS made it just that much better, but there was still some frustrations there. I have been out of that realm for a little while. I'd be interested to see how ADMS is working for the company. Lots of great changes, I think, since we both started working.

John:  Absolutely.

Bill:  I do want to go back, though. Way back to 1985 when you hired in. Maybe a little known fact, I don't know, is that actually, your father had retired in October of '84.

John:  That is correct.

Bill:  You came to work here in June of '85. Was there any influence by your father's experience here that made you want to come check us out?

John:  No. I don't remember any kind of influence. I was interviewing several different jobs at the time. Actually had a tentative offer from a Lear Siegler jet out of Grand Rapids.

I don't remember him ever trying to influence me in any way. He was just ecstatic that I was in IT because he knew it was such a growing field. He kept encouraged me to make sure you keep all possibilities open because it's changing so much.

What I will say that was most interesting is the second or third day I was at work, I got mail. My dad's name was John D Gribble. I'm John H. I started to get all his mail from the company about gas distribution. His last title was Chief Gas Distribution Operations Supervisor.

He had a named spot downtown at 212 Michigan Avenue. That's no longer there. Another big change in Consumers history. It was a really interesting thing to see all these...Again, no Internet that time. It was magazines. It was newspapers. It was all for my dad at that title. I keep saying return to sender or whatever, but they just kept coming. [laughs]

Bill:  How long was it before you stopped getting your dad's mail? That's interesting. [laughs]

John:  I think it really took a good couple of years. At the time, once you got someone in a company where you could send your periodical to, that was like gold to them. They could sell it to more people because they're sending those advertisements that are in there about their various fields at the time.

That's how we advertised back then, too. It wasn't just, "Here's the informational articles about what's going on in that industry." There was the [indecipherable 24:55] . There was what's for sale, that used stuff, the new stuff, and new technology for...It was all in the magazines back then. There wasn't an Internet for you to post your articles to about new stuff.

Bill:  Part of me has some feelings about that. I still like to hold a book and a magazine in my hands, but I love the ability to just go look something up quickly, too. It's a double‑edged sword.

John:  You don't even have to look it up anymore. You can just ask. Ask Siri, ask Google, or whoever, and you will get your response.

Bill:  They're always listening. You know that, John? [laughs]

John:  Yes, they are.

Bill:  We were talking off‑air a little bit about some of the legacy of Consumers. I don't know if we're unique in this or not, but it's been unique in my experience. Not only do I see a lot of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and all of that, that work here at Consumers, but I've seen multi‑generational folks that work here.

I think that says something for working at Consumers Energy. Your dad had quite a history here as well. He did some pretty cool things. We talked about the sniffer truck.

John:  When he first got out of University of Michigan, he was part of a group that worked on some of the designs of the first sniffers truck to smell out gas leaks. When you think about it, that was a safety thing in mind.

The company has always, as far as my dad was concerned, always had safety on the forefront of its mind. That is a huge selling point. My dad was always extremely particular about safety‑related issues.

He was a World War II veteran. He was part of the initial replacement troops at Normandy. They went on shore with 212 men. The next day, when they took roll, they were below 80. The next day after that, they were below 30.

I believe he was one of the sole survivors of his group. Other people that were injured like he was, got retrained and sent back. They didn't survive the second time.

He did not get sent back because he had shrapnel go into his left arm and by his eye. They had to send him for surgery because it was on a nerve. After the surgery, in his recovery, he went back to a mini basic training that was supposed to teach him more hand‑to‑hand combat techniques.

When he was working with a drill sergeant, he did this move that struck my dad where that surgery was. His arm went numb for three days. He couldn't move it. They said, "We can't send you back because you're going to get killed."

He went to England and France. Worked in some supply group that was really focused on delivering all the stuff that the troops needed after that. He was there when they bombed the wrong side. [laughs]

Bill:  Oh, my gosh.

John:  He was on that front for 44 days before that incident occurred. He has always, always had safety on the forefront of his mind. He did not like some of the OSHA standards. He didn't think that they were good enough. He took Consumers standards to a higher level because of that. He did not want any loss of life.

Bill:  Very dedicated to that as well. Again, before we recorded the podcast, we talked about the snowstorm in 1978. I remember that snowstorm. I'm still old enough, young enough, however you want to look at that, to remember that snowstorm. There was a problem with the gas system,

John:  There was. My dad, I said he went to University...I might not have said. He went to University of Michigan. He got a dual engineering degree in mechanical engineering and industrial engineering in three and a half years on the GI Bill. [laughs] He was a smart, smart, smart man.

He had most of the gas network memorized in his head because of his position. There was this one area that he was a little unsure of. That's where they had to make the change so hundreds of thousands of people wouldn't lose natural gas and lose the heat in their homes and businesses. He got the phone call at the house phone. [laughs]

Bill:  The one connected to the wall.

John:  The one connected to the wall with a little rotary dial thing.

Bill:  Try and envision this. [laughs]

John:  He got off the phone. He said to my mother, "I got to go to work." She said, "No, it's too dangerous." He looked at her and said, "Listen, if we don't find a way to do this, all these people are going to go without heat. We don't know when we're going to be able to get back out there. How many people are going to die of cold if I don't do this?"

Me, my brother, and my dad went out in the driveway, where there's a big, giant snowdrift in front of the garage door. My brother, who was six years older than I was, had grabbed the snowblower that we had. He's doing it sideways, lifting it up, trying to get snow away from the garage.

Eventually, we cleared the driveway, we cleared the garage. My dad pulled the Pontiac Catalina, the gigantic boat of a car that we pulled the trailer with, to go there. He got about 15, 20 feet. He couldn't go through the three feet of snow that we had.

We got the car out of the street. He pulled it back in the garage. He went in and told my mom, "I'm walking in." He walked just under three miles in to work through three feet of snow to look at the blueprint to confirm where we had to make an adjustment to ensure those people had natural gas for heating their homes and their businesses.

Saved the day, as far as I'm concerned. Spent the night there in his office. Then walked home the next day, another almost three miles and the three feet of snow after the snowing, the blowing, and everything else.

Bill:  From my perspective, maybe from yours, and from people who are listening, a three‑mile walk in snow like that is an incredibly amazing feat. If we think back along your father's history, having been a survivor of Normandy, through World War II, and all the things he did, it was probably not that bad for him. You know what I mean? It's all in perspective.

John:  He always played it down. He was one tough cookie, is all I'm going to say. I often felt, in all the incidents that I've seen, that he just didn't feel pain and discomfort like normal people. I think that might have come from him growing up in the Depression and how things were hard.

I was told this story that when he was a little kid and he would walk to school, he would take a bucket with him. It was his job after school, when he walked home, he walked along the train track. He would pick up pieces of coal that came off the train and put that in the bucket. That's the coal that they used to heat their home and cook their dinner.

I can't fathom having to go through that by today's standards. DoorDash deliver. [laughs]

Bill:  If I turn my stove on right now, click, click, click, I've got heat.

John:  Yes.

Bill:  If I turn my furnace on, I've got heat. I've got air conditioning. I think that we take a lot of those things for granted. I've interviewed a couple of folks now who were in World War II. Actually, two of them that retired from this company.

The amazing thing to me is, and I bet your father could put this together as well, is it's like they led three completely different lives. They grew up in the Depression. They went off to war. Their country asked them. They came home. They all went to college.

Herb Elfring, who worked for Consumers Energy, probably knew your dad, he went to U of M as well. Probably in the same time frame. Became an engineer. Came to work for Consumers. Then retired. Then had this life after retirement. It's like they lived three complete lifetimes in one lifetime.

John:  Yes.

Bill:  To probably sit down and talk to your dad when you were a young man, there's all of these things that he did that it's hard to say this is the same guy.

John:  It was. He never wanted to talk about the war. It wasn't till I learned about what happened to him, until my son had to do a project for school that interviewed preferably a World War II vet or a Vietnam vet. My son had a choice of my father or my wife's father because he was in Vietnam.

He had a choice. At the time, my dad was staying with us because he retired to Arizona. They would come back, and they'd spend a month at my one sister, and then another month with me. Then they'd head back.

He was staying with us. My son was starting to ask the questions. He said, "I'm going to have to finish this up when I get home." It was an email back. It was a totally different side of him that I had never seen or heard or experienced because he wouldn't talk about it with me.

It wasn't until he was in his late 70s that he could talk about it. Very, very difficult time. Very interesting, some of the responses he gave my son. Everybody in the camps, when they were going through basic trainings were fun and joking, talking it all up.

When they got on that convoy of ships, for the next 19 days to get across the ocean, he said, "You could count the words that people spoke on one hand," because they all knew where they were going and what it was going to be like. I can't fathom that.

Bill:  The other part of it too is you said he was part of the second wave to land at Normandy.

John:  Yes.

Bill:  They had the benefit, good or bad, of knowing what happened to that first wave and they did it anyway.

John:  Yes.

Bill:  That's the amazing thing. The first wave, those guys had to be scared. They didn't know what they were getting into. That second wave, they knew what they were getting into. That had to be horrifying.

John:  I can't wrap my head around it. Like I said, they started out 212 men. After day one, they were below 80. That's how many were killed in that first day on the beach. The second day on the beach, I think it was below 30. You knew you were going there to die.

Bill:  Right.

John:  The fact that you made it through was nothing short of a miracle, in my opinion.

Bill:  Right. When you talk to those guys that are still around and they're willing to talk, yeah, it's that...I think they came home with, "Why did I survive?" Many of them came home with that and said, "I'm here for a reason," and made a lot of really good, positive change for the places that they worked, for the country, and for the world.

They came home with the idea that, "I survived. I better do something with this life that I've been handed because there were so many that didn't."

John:  He did.

Bill:  Obviously, this is from the couple of stories that we shared. I bet we could sit here probably all day and talk about your dad and the things that he did.

John:  Yep.

Bill:  Part of his legacy is the fact that you're here today and that you work for our company. That you do you do positive things for this company to make sure that our IT is working correctly. That it's secure. That it's safe.

For the folks listening in, you weren't here in the conversation before the conversation. We had this excellent talk about not mixing your personal electronics with company electronics and why that's a bad idea.

It's just those conversations. It was natural for us to talk about. It wasn't like I was being lectured. It was just, "Here's my thought on that." That has positive change in how we do business and the things that we do, both as a company and as co‑workers within this company. I'm glad that you came back from Texas and that you're here.

John:  Thank you.

Bill:  I'm glad that we've been able to have this conversation. We are coming up on the end of the podcast. Before I go, is there anything that you would like our audience to take away from our conversation today?

John:  I've long endorsed the company's motto of safety first because I had that drilled into me from my father. I'm going to tell you a little incident that I went through in 2015 and 2016, where I was very, very ill and almost went to see my dad early [laughs] a couple of different times.

Fact of the matter is that this company stood by me. This company continues to stand by its employees. Look at what they did for us during this COVID thing. This is a good company to work for. Don't take it for granted. Let your kids come to work here. Let your brother and sister come to work here. It is a good place to work.

I have thoroughly enjoyed it. In hindsight, I don't think I would have changed anything in my career. I actually needed that three‑year little break at USAA to open my eyes up to other things. I brought some of that back and was able to teach some of my peers that used to be my seniors some things.

It was like the shoe was on the other foot. I had now something to bring to the table. I've tried to do that. I've tried to make a difference. I hope I have. I believe I have. I'm going to continue to do that. Be that person of change.

Bill:  I know that that's appreciated, definitely. I couldn't agree more. I think I needed some time away from here as well to really appreciate what it is to work for this great company. I would love it if my kids and my grandkids decided to work here. I would definitely encourage it.

John, thanks so much for talking about all the things we talked about today. For sharing the stories of how you got here, for sharing some stories about your father. I'm sure the audience is really going to love it.

John:  Thank you very much for having me. I do appreciate it.

Bill:  Thank you to the audience for listening in today. The Me You Us podcast is proudly sponsored by Consumers Energy, leaving Michigan better than we found it. Remember, you can find the Me You Us podcast on all major podcasting platforms. Be sure to go out, find us, and subscribe.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, please contact the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. If you're a veteran or you know a veteran who is in crisis, you can call 988 and press one for the Veterans Crisis Line.

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Bill:  Remember to tune in every Wednesday as we talk about the things that impact your personal well‑being.

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