Yeah my Dad has told me similar stories. In fact, I'm finding a similar thing now when I'm using the university supercomputer. I don't have to submit using punched cards anymore (thank goodness) but I do have to submit jobs to the batch queue and give them an estimated time the job will take to complete. This impacts the scheduling of the jobs, so if I submit a job and say it'll take 12 hours to run, then it is unlikely to start for a while. This gives me another reason to check the code very carefully, or I wait overnight and find that my code crashed after 2 seconds with a silly error!