Houston was such a flat area and David heard a joke about its flatness before heading there. An employee in a Floridian location of the Burrito House told him that an eight foot mound in Houston could be called a hill. So David paid extra attention to constructions more than eight feet high when living in Houston and found many of them. Working in the city of Houston it seemed that joke fell "flat" because many of the ups-and-downs close to highway intersections were more than eight feet. David later learned how fast those ups and downs got flattened quickly whenever there was a heavy rain, and that was the start of the problem for a place being so "flat". The Floridian guy was also the first person who explained to David about hurricanes, words like "tail span" and "hunker down". These were not words that David had learned when living in Midwest or Pacific Northwest. There were tornados or earth quakes in those areas, but not hurricanes. Hurricanes are the kind of destructive strong storms formed in the Atlantic Ocean. If the same thing happened in the Pacific, they are called Typhoons, but since David lived in the inner China, not the coastal areas, he had never experienced or learned about that sort of natural disaster either.

In 2005, David's knowledge about such natural disasters suddenly accumulated exponentially. In his brief trip to the small Florida branch of the Burrito House, he heard there was a Hurricane Dennis approaching and then experienced the dreadful driving condition in the "tail span" of that hurricane. Dennis left falling branches everyone on the road with eye-blinding rains and falling objects dropping from the sky seemed every other two minute. It was something David no longer wants to encounter again, but most of the local residents and his Floridian co-workers seemed to dismiss it as just a normal summer. When David traveled back to Houston, he started to see many other forms of inconvenience under the influence of the Hurricane. When it rained in the summer, it rained really hard in Houston. Water quickly accumulated along the highways especially in the side roads along those highways where the unique Texas style "U-turn lanes" were built. In places where water fast accumulated and drainage quickly clogged, small cars like the Burrito House delivery cars which David was assigned had the tendency to float like boats. To avoid such awkward scenes and avoid been just another TV screenshot or floating vehicle statistics, David decided to go to work early or stay late to avoid being caught in the rain whenever heavy rains were in forecasts.

When darkness fell, the usual hassling-and-bustling Houston quickly turned into almost another city. There were very few people staying outside in a not-so-great neighborhood where Burrito House head office was located. The only people staying outside are mostly rowdy teenagers with conversations such as "Want some crack, man? Top quality! Best kind! Only five dollars"! Occasionally, David also saw big and fat middle fingers sticking out from some beat-up GM Buick that were running the red light, but acting like police cruiser. Driving out of evening downtown Houston heading west, once after the Elgin Street turned into Westheimer Road, especially when getting closer and closer to Galleria, it looked like the movie Wizard of OZ turning from black-and-white movie into a colored one. Houston suddenly became one of the nicest cities in the world, with bright and shining constructions everywhere along the road and even in the middle of the road the road signs looked like neon lights or small scale triumphant arches. Many fancy cars were roaming the streets in Houston. The theories behind fancy cars in the Houston streets and the urban legend about the life of Houstonian were: they enjoy the big city salaries, but were not burdened by big city expenses for house hold items or big city mortgages for real estates. Therefore they could often afford luxury cars and like to show off those luxury cars in and around the areas of Galleria and Rice University, or drive to Galveston for weekends to see Gulf of Mexico.

In the summer, the unique Galleria cooling system also served as a tourist attraction and a breath of cool air outdoors. The water carrying hot air out of Galleria was cleverly crafted as a gigantic man-made waterfall falling from almost ten stories high. The falling water splashed into small cool breath again and greeted tourists with small breezes. Such a half natural cooling facility fits Houstonians and the city of Houston flawlessly because summer in that city is generally renowned for its length and intensity.

In the midst of the summer, there could be sudden chains of thunder and lightening accompanied by down pour of rains and then all goes quiet and peaceful again in the sky, leaving tens of thousands of people frustrated on the ground, in this American's fourth populous city.

2005 was an unusual and ominous year for the entire world. Right before the New Year, the Asian Tsunami killed tens of thousands of people in Asia and devastated countless number of villages, towns and cities. In the summer, the whimsical mood of the "mother nature" or "mother weather" did not change.

One unexpected storm of thunder and lightening crashed the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the computer room of the Burrito House. Before the UPS could be repaired, another storm came and took out the email servers of the Burrito House head office. It was a very rudimentary SMTP server, with a couple hundreds of mailboxes on a Linux workstation doubling as a server. All of a sudden, people in Burrito House appeared as if they could no longer work properly and many kept on asking: "how did we work 10 or 15 years ago, when there was no email?" Without finding an answer to their own questions, many of them started running around like headless chickens. Usually Bob Sutton's son -- Rob Sutton -- would come and troubleshoot the email server for Burrito House, since he was the one who built the Linux mail server. But with the water on the road that day and Rob been far away from downtown Houston, not to mention still tied up by his fulltime regular job, he could not arrive until after seven o'clock when everybody would have been gone. Burrito House CEO Ruben Turner kept on coming to IT department to ask for the status of the mail server. Knowing it probably wouldn't help, he kept on coming once every 15 minutes just to put pressure on the IT staff.

Ruben's anxiety was triggered by the incident when UPS was fried by the lightening several days ago. When the UPS went out, the power supply was naturally affected and the entire building went dark and email server was stopped for 15 minutes along with call center and other important business departments. Later on, that particular 15 minutes was discovered to have delayed several very important emails to Ruben, therefore he couldn't help but worrying that more email would be lost this day when the entire hard drive of the SMTP email server was fried and the recovery work would not start until seven o'clock in the evening. He kept on walking into the IT department and his inquiries turned from polite to instructional to reproaching. He started yielding to Terry Collins, the IT manager of the Burrito House, "I told you not to let this happen again, can you hear me? You got to fix this problem and that battery too" pointing to the UPS and referring to it as a "battery". "There is unlimited budget for this, alright? Thank you!!!" Of course, the "thank you" had another ring to it.

Terry started asking Bob "can you ask Rob to come earlier?" Bob answered: "he really can't".

David felt he could no longer continue with his programming project with many the commotions going around in the IT department, and offered: "actually, building a SMTP server only takes but about 2 hours at most, if you have a list of users and passwords". Terry was happy beyond recognition and said, "Well, I have them all in a spreadsheet!"

Afterwards, David quickly installed a Red Hat Linux with minimum setting plus SMTP and POP3 servers and turned the Excel spreadsheet of users into a shell script to add all of the hundreds of email users with their mailboxes. Bob started setting passwords for all the users one by one, and Terry started calling all the employees to start checking their email. Starting from big shots at first as a matter of course, then to average employees, everyone at Burrito house finally got their email box filled again before the end of the day. Terry couldn't stop thanking David after the mail server was running again, and Bob kept on saying that Ruben should take David to a Rockets' or Texans' game with the company season tickets and let David picked out a certain date. Unfortunately, it was not in the basketball season and Texans' football wasn't that good. Houston Astros were very good that year, but nobody wanted to spare a corporate season ticket to David, so that offer got put on hold.

The hurricane season dragged on. But when all the email servers were functioning properly, days went by just like any other days. David continued to work on the Burrito House POS project and the project entered post-development training and documentation period. In order to prepare for the final deployment, the system had to be used by selected restaurant employees to test its usability. The first step of the beta test was to train employees who would most likely be the first ones to use the new system. In between training sessions, David continued to travel between Vancouver, BC and Houston, TX. During one flight from Vancouver to Houston, he saw many airline passengers having their eyes glued on airport TVS watching many taking merchandises from shops while complaining about the terrible conditions in New Orleans, Louisiana or at the Superdome. That was when David heard that Katrina had struck the Big Easy and a levee had been breached.

The following work week, people in the office started talking about Katrina all over the places, and it seemed like a large number of victims of the Hurricane Katrina started heading to Houston the fourth populous city in the United States. These people were first called "refugees", but after Reverend Jesse Jackson said "we are not refugees . . . but evacuees" on TV, then it became politically incorrect for people from New Orleans to be called "refugees".

More reports and stories suddenly erupted onto all forms of the media in the United States about Hurricane Katrina, especially in the Gulf Coast regions. After the hurricane breached the levee of New Orleans, New Orleans police department (NOPD) could not control many looters taking goods and merchandises from local stores or near by office buildings. Nor were effective efforts organized to gather local police force in the city. Some police felt too ashamed to see the scenes and committed suicides. The city was taken over briefly by anarchy.