Chapter 17: Classes, Clubs, and Games

Tuesday, August 28, 1984

We were up around eight-thirty and eating breakfast by nine. For a change, Cammie and Mel were still upstairs. Their Tuesday/Thursday classes started later than ours. Angie and Paige joined us for breakfast, though, since their first class started when ours did.

Angie and Paige were sad that they didn’t have Dr. Meyer based on the description Cammie and I had given them. We’d see how Dr. Kenton fared in their estimation.

My first class of the day, CS 204 - Computers and Programming, was held in Zachry, the primary engineering building. It was only a block or so from Blocker, where Angie and Paige were headed, so we walked together. Jas was off to her history class, also held in the Academic Building. Sooner or later I’d have to visit it, I was sure.

Even if I had just been ‘me,’ not ‘I have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science’ me, Computers and Programming would have looked dull and annoying. I’d taken a similar class at UT, and that class had been dreary. The only difference between the two looked to be that UT taught assembly language programming on a Control Data mainframe while A&M used an IBM System/360. Given that Control Data was already in something of a death spiral, while many System/360 programs could still be run on Z Series computers in 2021, I figured A&M had the leg up in this case.

That said, I was never going to be a System/360 assembly language programmer. Once this class was over, that was it. As for assembly language itself, I could (legitimately!) say that I’d forgotten more about it than the instructor knew.

Our instructor was Mr. Baker. Yes, Mister. Not Professor, not Doctor. He held the title of ‘Lecturer,’ which (in my experience, and it appeared in this case) was code for ‘the guy does something useful, we can use him to fill a hole in our class schedule, and he’s not a grad student.’

I suspected that what Mr. Baker did was write programs in Fortran. He said ‘unlike in Fortran... ‘ about thirty times during the hour and a half of class.

If I’d had to count on him teaching me anything, this class would have been potentially bad. Since I didn’t, it was likely going to be an easy ride. If anything was going to be hard about it, it would be taking pity on the other students and helping them through their own assignments. As long as you weren’t just giving them a working solution, helping them was encouraged, and I likely would.

Well, that and punched cards. Our programs would be turned in and run with old-school punched cards. There are dozens of stories involving dropped boxes of punched cards and hours-long sorting sessions following such a drop. If anything was going to derail me, that would.

That, and I really was a lousy write-it-then-run-it-once programmer. I’d mostly learned through interactive systems with fast turnaround.

Still, I was probably less lousy than anyone else in the room.

Including the instructor.

I went home for lunch, as did the rest of us. Might as well save those dining credits while I could, and home was only about twice as far as the closest dining hall option (Sbisa). That, and my next class wasn’t until 2:30. Plenty of time to head home, then venture out again.

My last class of the semester was Math 165, aka Topics in Contemporary Mathematics I. It was a survey course covering all sorts of potentially interesting (or perhaps deadly boring) things. The most interesting for me were ‘Systems of linear equations,’ ‘linear programming,’ ‘probability,’ and ‘computer algorithms.’

That last one would probably be stuff I already knew, and I knew a lot of the rest, but having a solid handle on this stuff would help when I tried to understand what Angie was saying (even if she was several levels ahead of me, and was only going to get further ahead still). Plus, much of the material had solid business applications. This wasn’t a required class, though. Math 166B was required, but I was planning to take the regular 166.

The professor, one Dr. Gregory, was old but seemed sharp as a tack. He was one of those people in whose class one did not whisper, pass notes, or nod off. He caught at least two people doing each of those in the first session and made examples of them.

In two cases he was looking away from them. I’m not sure how he spotted them, but the guy was sharp. I could respect that!

Dinner, thanks to the efforts of Jas and Paige, was steak and asparagus. We definitely wouldn’t have steak every day, but it seemed like a nice bonus to celebrate our first two days at the university level. Jas served a pretty nice red wine to go with it.

The consensus remained the same: everyone liked their classes. Angie and Paige were torn between being unhappy that Dr. Kenton was a middle-aged paunchy balding guy and being happy that he wouldn’t distract them at all, unlike (potentially) Dr. Meyer.

Cammie and I were in favor of potential distractions.

The Battalion (back down to 20 pages) had another tempting offer that most of us couldn’t, in the end, refuse. TAMU (that’s Texas A&M University) Theater Arts — the student drama group — had season tickets on sale. Their series was ‘Lilliom’, ‘Tango’, ‘Antigone’, and ‘You Can’t Take It With You’. None of us had seen any of them, so that was a plus.

Cammie and Mel passed. That wasn’t a huge surprise to the rest of us. Broadway touring companies were enough of a draw, but they weren’t as much into drama as the rest of us were. That said, if we had a good time, they’d probably wind up convinced to go to the next show.

There continued to be no further discussion of GSS in the Batt. All of us considered that a good thing.

Wednesday, August 29, 1984

Steak last night, budgeting tonight. We’d been pretty ad hoc with how we handled food expenses up until now, and Angie felt like Cammie and Mel were starting to feel uncomfortable about it, so we had a house meeting.

After a fair amount of discussion, we decided that all of us would put a fixed amount into our household food budget. Angie and Jas successfully argued that, since I was bigger, I should put in more. Cammie and Mel, I think, saw that as subterfuge for my subsidizing them, but decided to concede the point gracefully.

Cammie had already pretty much agreed that I was going to subsidize her somewhat anyway. She was keeping a list of things to pay back, which I was planning to ignore when the time came. By the time that happened, it shouldn’t matter anyway — by then, I’d have found a way to cut Cammie and Mel in on some of the profit. Not Dell directly, but some other profit somewhere.

Anyone who wanted their own special things could purchase them (of course), and we would respect anything someone said was off-limits. That, and each apartment had plenty of space for food storage (though no refrigeration, as of yet).

We also agreed to split most utility bills. However, the phone was a special case. Long distance directly on the phone bill was the responsibility of the user. We all used calling cards for long distance, so that might never happen.

I think everyone felt relieved after we had this hammered out. Often, the disputes that screw up shared housing aren’t some big thing. They’re about who made an expensive phone call, or who stole someone’s snacks, or who ate more than everyone else.

This didn’t make that impossible, but it gave us a framework to handle things, and it made it clear to everyone that not only could we talk about this stuff, but that we would talk about it anytime someone thought there was an issue.

Thursday, August 30, 1984

I was up and out very early this morning, heading off to Kyle Field, the football stadium, to get our tickets for this weekend’s game. Our opponent was one of the ‘other’ UT’s - UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso. As far as I could tell, the use of ‘t.u.’ did not extend to other campuses, thankfully. ‘tuEP’ would be awkward.

UTEP should be not a bad game for A&M, but I knew this was likely to be a rocky season. If I was going to place a bet — which I wasn’t at all sure that I would — it would be on t.u. vs A&M. That game had been a completely unexpected debacle for Texas in my first life.

I doubted that I would. Kyle Branner would be somewhat grumpy and Martin Connelly would at least say ‘tsk tsk’ a few times. I was on the right side of the IRS right now, all of my gambling had been before I was 18 (and thus a juvenile, which likely wouldn’t matter but might at least throw some sand in the gears), and the clock was running on the statute of limitations. Betting now would reset the clock, would make me clearly an adult, and would mean I’d have to file yet another tax return with comments about pleading the 5th embedded in it.

Now, if I wound up with a 21-year-old friend who’d be willing to go to Vegas and place a bet, that might be different. The odds weren’t great of that happening, though.

Be all of that as it may, I got to the stadium around 7:15 to find a line I guessed had at least one hundred people in it. I needed to get through that line no later than 9:45 to make it to my computer science class (and, if I left that late, I’d have to jog). Then again, people missed college classes all the time, and I doubted I was going to miss any great insights from Mr. Baker.

In fact, the line moved right along — opening six ticket windows really helped! — and I had my tickets by 8:30. Not bad, considering they opened at 8:00. By the time they’d opened, the line was at least four times as long. Once again, the early bird got the worm.

In this case, the worm wasn’t the most desirable of all worms, but then we were lowly freshmen. We had tickets around the 30-yard-line — not too bad — but on the highest deck on the student side. The helpful woman giving me the ticket told me these would likely be the best seats we got all year. If I kept coming early — which she encouraged — we should be able to be no worse than the 10-yard-line this year. In the years when t.u. came here, end zone was more likely for freshmen, and even as sophomores we might have trouble.