I am on my way to the computer center to submit my cards for execution.*
On the way, I encounter my University advisor, Dr. B., and we stop and chat for a brief moment.
I look up at Dr. B. and as usual his presence is like an anomaly, his neatly combed hair and noticeable Jersey accent, he is not like the other dirt people in my department.
Dr. B. is complaining to me, coming from the computer center, about a woman there.
He says this woman has ruined the execution of his program because of her nails.
Her nails, whether long or thick have indented his cards as she grabbed his deck to feed into the computer, thus, the execution of his program has failed.
It is not clear whether Dr. B. is going back to the work room to re-punch his cards or if he will be returning home for dinner in his gold Cadillac.
On my way now, continuing, I wonder, is Dr. B. telling me an actual truth? Could it be true that a woman with nails could ruin all the work that we do, with her nails? or was his story to me symbolic of the detrimental potential of the feminine in the working world?
What would be true is that in the future I would remember this encounter more than being able to recall the equation of Newton's law of universal gravitation.
He was a good teacher.
* In the late 1970's in order to execute a computer program, example, Fortran, one needed to punch out each line of the program on physical cards. Then, each card of the program was stacked in a deck and submitted to a main frame computer for execution. This was very time consuming as it was expected that there would be errors, and thus, cards would have to be re-punched and submitted until the program was error free.