Nathan Weaver, a student from the United States studying Logistics in Zaragoza, was found asleep in the first floor library of the Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC) early Monday morning by Lupe Lopez, the building's cleaning lady.
Ms. Lopez was wiping the library tables when she noticed a mountain of books and papers in the corner of the room. Assuming that a shelf had fallen down, she dropped her towel and began replacing the books.
Suddenly, the pile began to move. Ms. Lopez shrieked and lept backward in surprise. Then she heard a voice rising from the heap. ".... Optimize the process output Markov Chain .... integrate suppliers with BizTalk schema .... do it in LINGO ...." Terrified, Ms. Lopez bolted from the room and phoned the authorities.
"I thought he was the devil," she remarked, shortly after police arrived.
Mr. Weaver was quickly uncovered and offered hot chocolate. After a physical examination, he was taken to the hospital for treatment. He suffered from dehydration and a ruptured spleen, caused by the heavy "Operations Research" book by Wayne Winston.
"That SOB Wayne Winston should know better. Such a heavy book was bound to hurt someone sooner or later. I hope he's happy," ranted an irate student, Joseph Butler.
General consensus at the ZLC is that the content of the Winston book is exceptional, but the material would be better presented in twelve bound volumes, not one.
Amazingly, Mr. Weaver's drool formed the rough outline of a Petri Net. Petri Nets are used to model business processes and are superior to Event Driven Process Chains because of their formal structure and executability. In this case, the bubbles represent objects in a process, called tokens.
When asked why he was sleeping in the school library, Mr. Weaver replied "after the eighth hour of reading, I blacked out. That and my landlord hasn't given me keys yet." Indeed, his landlord Eduardo had not given his keys as promised a month earlier, so Mr. Weaver stayed at the ZLC late into the night, rather than arouse his roommates.
Sleeping students are not uncommon at the ZLC. Authorities report to the building five to seven times per year to the facility to investigate bodies found by various staff and administrators. Such investigations are normally distributed with a mean of december and a standard deviation of 1.5 months.
This is not the first time that Ms. Lopez has claimed to have seen the devil, either. A firm believer in the Book of Revelation, Ms. Lopez encounters the devil two or three times per day. On the same morning that she found Mr. Weaver, Ms. Lopez saw the devil in a runny egg and heard the devil in the engine of her '91 Ford Fiesta.
To reduce the occurrence of overnight guests and devil sightings, the ZLC plans to decrease the price of coffee in the snack room three percent. The school has entertained other suggestions, such as replacing the carpet with gravel or fumigating the floor with mustard gas every night at 3:00.
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PETER DRUCKER: International economic theory is obsolete. The traditional factors of production - land, labor, and capital - are becoming restraints rather than driving forces. Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production. It has two incarnations: Knowledge applied to existing processes, services, and products is productivity; knowledge applied to the new is innovation.
When you look at it that way, the last 40 years of economic history begins to make some sense. The Japanese have shot themselves into the world economy by concentrating on productivity, while we have concentrated on innovation. But the Japanese have neglected innovation. They are now desperately trying to catch up; the results are not yet good. The Germans have totally neglected innovation and show no signs of even trying to catch up. Now we in the US are desperately trying to catch up on productivity.
Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography. It underlies the most significant and unprecedented social phenomenon of this century. No class in history has ever risen as fast as the blue- collar worker and no class has ever fallen as fast. All within less than a century.
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