I never knew why Fifi showed up at RMIT Professional Writing. She was a refugee teacher from the TAFE Business School in Berk Street.

I put down my dry martini and copy of Tattler and said, ‘welcome aboard’ and made a note to write three more short courses to pay for her salary.

It was a surprise when 12 months later, Fifi was chosen to lead the creation of one of the Faculty Flagship programs, the full fee Master of Virtual Communication (MVC), using 10 of my staff. None, including Fifi, had built a post graduate program.

The indebted faculty hoped the programs would set the cash registers ringing. Edifying stuff.

Writing a 12-course master degree and getting it accredited took 18 months and roughly $600k to build. Fifi did much of the heavy lifting and in doing so, made enemies of most of the staff.

Unfortunately, 90 per cent of the program was online, which was in its infancy then. It also should have been called the Master of Digital Communication because virtual communication connoted 3D platforms.

As we were going to launch it in the middle of the 2000-2003 global techno crash, it had absolutely bugger-all chance of succeeding. Zero. Zip. Nada. None.

I told the Dean, Ms Heinrich Himmler Molloy (the Dean’s bag lady) and the various hanger-ons with meaningless titles, this was a non-starter. Wait a year or two, I said. Fuck off, Noddy they said.

I threw $30k at marketing and advertising the MVC. We did face-to-face meetings with the HR heads of IBM, Hewlett Packard and other big techs. You could have heard a pin drop.

Fifi enrolled 20 part-time punters in the first year and 12 in the second, where it crashed deeply into the red. The plan to internationalise the program crumbled because unbeknown to us, our idiot sister school built a Flagship Program called the Master of Online Communication, which covered 60 per cent of the MVC content.

You think university people are smart? Think again.

What about the poor buggers who signed up for the degree? What about the brand damage to the school and university? What about the thousands of staff hours used to build it?

I was working with people who couldn’t get a fuck in a fuck shop, even if they were selling discounted fucks. I made for the door.

But there was one winner. From the ashes of the MVC arose Fifi, who was promoted to Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor. Thank God all that work, time and money wasn’t wasted.