Well, while we obviously were both upset and sad about the situation, she was very understanding, for which I am thankful. We were in it together. It helped that she managed to find a slightly better job pretty shortly thereafter. Nevertheless I felt really guilty about it and as a result the obvious relevant professional programming lesson was instantly and indelibly burned into my brain: you can fix bugs, but you may never be able to undo the real world user level consequences of the buggy software's time in production before being fixed. I was just out of college then and it solidified more respect for the power of the machine.