When in college I worked for the Computing Services Department at my university. They provided computer services to the general student population, but not services for classes.

This was completely separate from the Computer Science Department. (How could you not tell from the titles!) Computer Science ran programming classes for students in the engineering school.

There was a class that my thesis professor wanted to teach, which was an Introduction to Programming for non-engineering students. Which was a great idea, and a pretty novel concept for 1990. However he was hamstrung because:

• Being 1990, computer resources were seriously expensive.
• The Computer Science Department didn’t want to spend their budget on non-engineering students.
• The Computing Services Department didn’t want to spend their budget on classes.

Back then the only language you could really teach to non-programmers was Basic. So both groups avoided supporting this class by not installing Basic on any of their machines. This went on for several years.

Then one day the university had a budget crisis. In the clever way that universities have, they solved this by mandating that every department lay off its two most junior people. I was one of those two I was given two weeks to “wrap up whatever I needed to”.

My professor had done a *lot* for me over the past few years. He was an amazing man. So I decided to pay it back, at least a little. I took that two weeks to get Basic up and running on a Computing Services Department machine. I probably spent 100 hours in those two weeks getting this done. (I only got paid for 40 since I was a half-time employee.)

After being officially let go I went to my prof’s office and told him what I did. He truly loved fighting through bureaucracy so appreciated it even more. The joy on that man’s face! Worth all the extra time I put in.

His new class, with hundreds of students each semester, ran on that department’s machines for the next decade.