Chapter 34: Complaints and Resolutions

Monday, November 12, 1984

Our chem test finally came back. Paige and I tied with 64s. This time, the A/B line was 51, so we’d done quite well.

It was perhaps a bit of a surprise that we were doing so well. It’d been years since I’d studied chemistry and decades since I’d studied it at this level. Paige was no more of a chemist than me.

Still, we had very hard-won study habits and discipline, and that made a big difference.

I headed straight to the Computer Science Department office as quickly as possible after State and Local Government ended. Cammie tagged along, mostly because we always walked to accounting together.

When I got there, the secretary glanced at me and said, “How may I help you?”

I said, “I’d like to ... no, strike that. It’s not that I’d like to. I need to make a complaint about the instructor for one of my classes.”

A guy, probably in his fifties, happened to be passing by and stopped.

“You ‘need’ to make a complaint about one of the professors?” he said. To his credit, he sounded more concerned than skeptical. He’d glanced at Cammie, though, so I wondered if he might have gotten the wrong idea. That was a guess, though, and I hoped it wasn’t that.

“Not exactly, Sir. I need to make a complaint about one of the lecturers. He’s not a professor.”

The lack of surprise on his face tended to confirm that he knew there might be a problem in that area.

“Come with me, if you would,” he said.

The sign on his office door said ‘Bruce McCormick, Ph.D.’ and the line below that said ‘Department Head’. Inwardly, I was shaking my head. Nothing like going right to the top!

He closed the door after we’d both gone in, then turned to me.

“Bruce McCormick,” he said, offering his hand.

“Steve Marshall,” I said, shaking.

“Marshall?” he said. “I try to keep up with all of our students, but I must have missed you. Please, sit!”

He sat, and I did, too.

“I’m actually in Business,” I said.

He frowned. “None of the business-related classes are taught by lecturers.”

“This is about CS 204.”

“Ah!” he said. “Permit me to ask why you’re in 204?”

“Interest,” I said. “I’m potentially aiming at a CS minor. I placed out of 203 with the new AP exam and the required Business Data Processing Concepts class is ... well, useless, if you can place out of 203. Given that, I made a deal with my advisor to substitute 204. They were happier with me taking something rather than just accepting the AP credit.”

He shook his head, smiling.

“That makes sense. So, what’s our prodigal lecturer up to now?”

I opened my backpack and took out a paper.

“I copied the test. Solely so I could complain, mind you! I’ve made a few notes.”

I passed it over. My comments were things like ‘Not enough registers to do this,’ ‘Cannot be computed within the lifespan of the universe,’ ‘Cannot be stored within the universe,’ and ‘Question difficult to interpret.’

He shook his head, staring at it.

“Well,” he said, after a few seconds, “I can’t fault your analysis. You’re right — the shuffling problem itself isn’t bad, but as written it can’t be run. The others are, at best, incredibly sloppy.”

I nodded, and said, “At least, to his credit, he didn’t ask us to solve the Halting Problem.”

Dr. McCormick chuckled.

“You’re clearly ahead of the typical sophomore if you’re thinking of the Halting Problem.”

“Freshman,” I said. “I — and my friends — have a habit of reading ahead.”

In this case, that would be nearly forty years ahead. It had to be that way, because I wouldn’t have encountered that topic until 1985 otherwise.

He chuckled again.

“I would say so! Obviously, you can’t be worried about your grade.”

I shook my head.

“It’s the others. A lot of them aren’t really learning all that much. I probably should have complained months ago, but we were making progress and the first exam wasn’t that bad. This ... I could see the expressions. Some of them know it was bad, but others will think they’re the problem, and they’re not.”

He nodded slowly.

“Laudable. This...”

He tapped the paper on his desk a few times.

“Look,” he said. “Please don’t spread it around that you complained. I promise that we’ll take this very seriously and take action, but ... well, it’ll be better if it looks like it came from the department. If you don’t see any action by next week, I’ll understand if you ignore me, but I promise that it won’t drag out that long.”

“I can do that,” I said, nodding.

He sighed, then smiled.

“This is good for us in the long term. I moved here to head the department last year when they split Computer Science off from Industrial Engineering. Since then, I’ve been trying to deal with some of the lecturers. We need to do better, and this will help with that. In the short term, it’s a mess, but so would having a class mostly full of CS majors come out with a hole in their education.”

“Happy to help,” I said. “As I said, I probably should have done this earlier, but I was willing to live and let live until ... well, I couldn’t.”

“I appreciate that. Listen, Steve. My door is always open. If you see things like this, please, come talk to me.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

He smiled and rose, so I did, too.

We shook hands again, and then he came around the desk and opened the door.

“You’ll see action before next week,” he said.

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” I said.

I headed back to the reception area. Cammie got up and headed out of the office with me.

As we headed out of the engineering building and towards accounting, Cammie said, “So?”

“He says he’ll handle it. And ‘he’ is the department head.”

“‘The buck stops here!’”

“Sounds like it. He promised action within the week and asked me not to spread it around.”

She nodded and said, “Yeah. It probably doesn’t look good that they have no idea what’s happening in one of their classes.”

“That’s how I saw it,” I said. “Sometimes the illusion of having everything under control is a big deal.”

We’d lucked out by picking the 30th for Bruce Springsteen. In fact, we’d doubly lucked out.

A&M’s Bonfire (a truly gargantuan affair, involving a 55-foot tall stack of logs) was to be held on the 29th, the other night we could have seen Bruce. We all wanted to see it burn, so thank goodness we wouldn’t be in Houston!

Alone amongst the students (I hadn’t even told Angie), I was afraid for the future. Not the immediate future, though. Sometime in the late 1990s (I couldn’t remember when), that year’s Bonfire had collapsed during construction, killing roughly a dozen students and injuring many more. I had hopes of being able to avoid that. The right sort of donation could probably fix things without anyone ever realizing that I knew something I shouldn’t. After all, who could imagine that I knew something about a major accident that never happened?

I would probably tell Angie and the others before then, but there was no point worrying them now.

The double part of the luck was that Willie Nelson would be performing at Jolly Rollie after Bonfire. As with several other concerts, it took me some work to convince the others that Willie would be worth seeing. None of us were big country music fans, and I needed to pull out a few comments from the future about Willie’s longevity and influence.

By 2021, Willie was truly a legend. Right now, he was definitely a name, but his career hadn’t gone down the many twists and turns it would eventually take.

That is, if this universe’s Willie was the same as mine. I hoped he was.

The first of our evening study groups this week was Jasmine’s American Mass Communication group. We all had a group, though, and a few of us joined another group once ours was done.

The odds were that few of the people we’d invited would be long-term friends, much less ‘family.’ Still, I couldn’t have predicted that Mel would wind up living in a house with me when I’d invited her to our nascent study group. Nor could I have predicted that Cammie would join her (much less as Mel’s girlfriend!) when we’d first met on that first day in debate.

And I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that Jas or Paige would even join our study group, much less become who they were to us, back when I’d first met them.

Most people meet quite a few long-term friends during college. Some of them might be among the people who’d come over to the house this week.

Tuesday, November 13, 1984

Whatever was going to happen with CS 204 was clearly taking time. Today’s class was pretty much the same as usual. Mr. Baker gave his usual muddled lecture. I watched several people’s eyes glaze over, which was (pardon the pun) par for the course.

I was looking forward to Thursday. Hopefully, we’d get this resolved while there was still a reasonable chance to salvage this semester for most of the students.

There was another debate forum this evening. The topic (‘Does A&M prioritize athletics over academics?’) didn’t really appeal that much to any of us, so we decided to skip it.

I hoped those who attended had a good time.

Instead of attending the forum, we decided to goof off a bit. In this case, ‘goof off’ meant talking about books, music, and movies that we liked that we thought the others would like but most likely wouldn’t have heard.

That turned out to be a major pain in the butt for Angie and me. Both of us kept thinking of great things that just plain didn’t exist yet. We tried not to say anything, or let on, but Paige realized fairly quickly that a whole lot of whapping would be going on if they held us to their usual standards.