WIRTW #811 (the 'uni' edition)

What's the last thing you wanted more than anything else in the world?

Not a promotion. Not a raise. Not even a Guardians World Series parade or a quadruple for the Arsenal.

I mean the thing you'd give up almost anything for. The thing that keeps you up at night hoping it happens, and a little scared that it won't.

For my son, that thing is England. Specifically, university in England.

He wants to study there. Live there. Build a career there, on the business and finance side of an English football club. Not playing. Helping run things. Contracts, budgets, transfers and balance sheets — the machinery behind the badge on the kit.

You can't build that career from Ohio. You build it by being there. Studying there. Networking, interning, and meeting the people who are already doing the job you want. Becoming part of that world instead of watching it from four thousand miles away, at 10:00 on a Saturday morning from a local supporters' pub.

So he set the goal. Then he did the hard part. The studying. The grades. The tests. The application essays. That's the part I'm proudest of. Not that his dream might come true. That he's the one making it come true.

Yesterday, the waiting ended. His first acceptance email landed. One school. One step closer to something he wants more than anything.

I won't pretend I was composed about it. My son is standing on the precipice of actually pulling off his dream. As a parent, there's no scouting report for that feeling. Just pride, a little relief, a screenshot of an email I'm never deleting, and, yes, some tears of joy.

He's not there yet. 

Four schools still to hear from. One big decision yet to make. And a senior year to finish. But the door just opened for him, and he's more than ready to jump through it. 

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Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.

Can HR listen in on an employee's doctor's appointment?

An employee on short-term disability is ready to come back. HR tells them they need a release from the doctor who took them off work. Fair enough. Then HR adds a twist: tell us when the appointment is so we can be on the phone to hear the doctor clear you. The employee thinks that's illegal and that HR is entitled to a note saying whether they can return and with what restrictions, nothing more.

I saw these facts on the AskHR subreddit. I thought it deserved an answer.

The employee is right. Here's what an employer should do instead.

Catching the thief red-handed isn't enough to win a trade secrets case

You can prove trade secrets theft cold and still lose the injunction.

That's the lesson from the 6th Circuit's recent decision in UEC Holdings v. Hatcher.

Steven Hatcher was VP of the utility division at United Electric, a Kentucky contractor. United Electric fired him in August 2025 for poor performance, dishonesty, and safety violations. Pulling his devices, the company found a month of texts with Troy Kent, owner of competitor Kent Power. Hatcher had shared pricing models and union hiring rates, then deleted the texts before turning in his phone. At the hearing, he didn't even deny some of what he shared was trade secret information. And when asked on the witness stand whether he'd had Hatcher review the pricing before submitting it to LG&E, Kent admitted: "Yeah, in some way."

The trial court granted a sweeping injunction anyway. The 6th Circuit vacated it.

Your shift supervisors can't have it both ways with tipped wages

Bartending doesn't launder a manager's cut of the tip pool. That's the entire lesson of a recent Department of Labor Opinion Letter.

Here's the setup. A restaurant has servers "tip out" a percentage of sales to bartenders, hosts, and bussers. One employee—titled "shift supervisor"—periodically works bartending shifts. While bartending, he also sets schedules, decides when shifts end, and handles other management functions. He collects a tip out from the servers. He also grabs a slice of the tips meant for hosts and bussers when he pitches in to help them.

Can he keep any of it? The answer is a clear, "No."

Three commutes; zero compensation

The Department of Labor just answered a question a lot of employers have been wondering about: if an employee splits her day between home and office, who pays for the drive in between?

TL;DR: Splitting the workday between home and office doesn't mean paying for the commute.

Start with what's never been in dispute: the drive to the office in the morning and home at night has never been compensated. That's true no matter how far away the employee lives, how bad the traffic is, or how many hours she works once she gets there. It's an ordinary commute, and ordinary commutes have always been on the employee's own time.

The harder question is what happens when that commute moves to the middle of the workday. A new Wage and Hour Division Opinion Letter works through three real scenarios.