In college, my girlfriend (at that point of two years) knew I was into incomprehensible theoretical math, but apparently I had never mentioned anything about computers or programming, which I was also pretty into.

One day we were both working in my room and a bunch of LexisNexis links she'd saved earlier just wouldn't work. She was on the verge of tears and panic — she'd spent days collecting these links, and now none of them worked. I said "lemme see" and sat down with her computer. I poked around with her saved links and tried some stuff on LexisNexis. Then I wrote a perl one-liner to munge her URLs. Voila: the munged URLs all just worked (the links had IP-based auth token that I just s///'d).

At no other point in my life have I been looked at with quite that degree of amazement and hero-worship.