David thought: "so much for all men are created equal, right here American business men are created with superiority than business men of any other nations. How many other countries ask American business men to report back to the border when they develop a new customer?" But for now, David was happy that after obtaining a Canadian passport, and a TN-1 visa and finally a Nexus Air card with all their associated costs in time and application fees, he could finally travel like a normal business men the way he learned in US educational systems and corporate America. How ironic?

After no longer getting haggle at the border as he used to, David noticed that his attention started to focus more and more on the works at hands. At least, he no longer need to spend the beginning of the week, pushing back the disgusting images about how the border was crossed and then spend the end of the week, resisting worries about how the border would be crossed again. Agent Johnson was right, that Nexus Air program was truly designed to save time for business people. Crossing the Canadian/US border at the airport now is almost as easy as traveling within Europe or among 50 States in the United States.

With time passed quickly, the first version of the POS application was fully developed for Burrito House. With everybody in Burrito House seeing an application taking shape, with toys like credit card reader, bar code scanner replacing manual works, everyone was praising Bud Westwood for introducing David and his team of contractors for their technical savvy and software development skills. David had an ill feeling that when things were too good to be true, it probably was. Right in front of his own eyes, the Nord Kia project in Stockholm, Sweden took a year to iron out all the bugs and ENS finally received the full payment of the project with an "conditional acceptance" document signed with a list of 10 "conditions".

That was one of the best case scenarios for an ordinary software contractor's project. It was called "conditional acceptance", but it was an "acceptance" with full payments nevertheless. There were "10 conditions" outstanding, but $15,000,000 were paid in full and conditions were no more than bargaining chips for Nord Kia to get free maintenance works and post sale add-on developments. David figured the Burrito House project would probably take another half year to get "accepted", since business people usually are not good friends when starting to talk about cash and payments. But for now, he really enjoyed the suddenly warmed up friendship with Bud Westwood and Burrito House. Bud even went so far as to ask if David wanted to work for him full-time in his Houston office. David courteously refused the offer since he was not fully convinced of Bud's commitments in investing in technology business. After all, Bud owned businesses in other trades besides technology, and he had only information technology works to survive. Also he found Bud had many interests in art and singing some times as a baritone or tenor. He was afraid that he this happened to be a high note Bud was singing and afterwards, all music would die and he would have no means to make a living working with Bud.

As an important franchisee of the Burrito House, Bud was looking good in the Burrito House headquarter during the period. As a good marketing professional, Bud started inflating the bubble of the new POS application within the organization, showing off all the flashy functionalities the new application had. David was not exactly sure whether to stop Bud or to encourage him. Software engineering was always the kind of non-flashy and tedious work in the eyes of the programming geeks. Even though every one of the functionalities was developed according to customer requirements, software applications would always have many bugs within after the first pass. To complicate things, when customers and contractors start talking about "acceptance", two sides usually disagree on what had been said in the documentations regarding software functionalities. David felt this "mission accomplished" sign would be taken down as soon as he started asking Bud for payments as a subcontractor, and Bud in turn started asking the Burrito House for payments as a contractor. For now, they are just enjoying a sort of honeymoon period with Burrito House management.

Usually, David was given a company car that looks exactly like a delivery vehicle but without company colors and paint sprayed on it yet. One day, he got a flat tire and had to turn in the company car. For the ensuing several days, David had to ride with Bud to and from work and Bud for his convenience, asked David to leave hotels for several days and just stay in his guest room in a suburb called Pear Land in the Greater Houston area.

They talked about many subjects through those several days of riding together. The talk started from many electronic gadgets in the old Mercedes Benz of Bud's car. In David's eyes, Bud Westwood was a wealthy enough person to be called "rich", but is among the poorest kind of rich persons in the United States, with his whole family driving Mercedes Benz, but invariably driving close-to-10-year-old Mercedes Benz. His passion was probably not on cars anyway, but rather on many electronic toys that he could get his hands on. There was a shining object distracting David and that was the screen saver of Bud's satellite radio.

David asked: "How do you think about satellite radios? Do you really listen to that many channels like you channel surf a cable TV?" Bud answered: "I like it. I can not possibly try that many channels. I mainly use it to get Fox News".

David: "Oh, Fox News. Right wing people usually say it is truthful, objective, do you also feel it is in the middle, moderate, unbiased also?"

Bud only answered: "I think it is still in the middle, but there are several prominent broadcasters of the station with strong Catholic beliefs, which is what I like."

David: "Are you very religious and conservative?"

Bud: "Well, I don't go to church every Sunday, if that is what you were asking. In fact, I haven't been to church for quite a long time now. When I was a kid, I used to be very religious and it was just because my parents were that way. Now I only pray to God when there are extreme difficulties in my life. I just say: 'God, God, please get me through this' and that's pretty much it. But I can't stand Clinton. I used to like him because I'd like to consider myself a moderate conservative. But I started to dislike him when he refused to salute some of the top generals in the military. Being born and raised in a military family, my parents took me all over the country and even stationed in Germany for a while when I was a kid. Not saluting other military man as a commander in chief was just too much for me to bear."

After driving another while, they started sitting in the daily social problem that nobody really care to talk about anymore in Houston -- the downtown traffic jam. People just continue with their conversation or other routines with high blood pressure, occasional curses and rare middle fingers.

One of the common topics colleagues talking to colleagues was about other colleagues. David found that Bud possessed the strong resentments towards the IT staff that are commonly found in non-IT staff, especially among individuals who like to play with new tech toys. David found it funny that he took a "not there's anything wrong with it" approach to brand almost every male IT employee in the Burrito House main office as homosexual, even though he had quite frequent contact with them. As most people do in other people's car, David just nodded and chimed in when hearing points that he felt agreeable and shut up when he couldn't agree. Occasionally he expressed some disagreements just to show that he had an independent opinion and was still listening.