Lou started going to a karate school near my hotel, since he doesn’t have Duke’s karate club over the summer. We made a deal that I could commute with the MGB instead of my bicycle if I started taking karate classes as well; that’s his way of encouraging me to exercise. He has a summer internship job in Research Triangle Park working in the stock room at IBM. The job isn’t at all what he had in mind, but he is making the most of it, and getting experience for a career in Operations Management. He came up with a great idea for organizing some of the inventory bins and submitted it for an improvement award. Turns out that his supervisor said that change was already in the works, and somehow the supervisor was going to get the credit for it all. Lou is really upset about the whole thing and came close to quitting. My dad used to talk about things like that happening at his machine shop job at General Electric. He was a toolmaker, and presented new ideas and inventions, but complained that the engineers or management always got the credit and the bonuses instead of the blue-collar guys; it was constantly “us versus them.” I don’t know why Lou is so upset, because soon enough, he’ll have his MBA and he’ll be one of “them” getting the better paycheck and all the pats on the back. Probably half of the time “they” get a knife in the back as well. Anyway, Lou works the night shift, so he drives me to work at 7am, picks me up at 3pm, we drive out to RTP to his job, then I drive back to Durham, go to my karate class, home for a bit, and then pick him up at IBM around midnight.