Yeah, I can imagine worse places to be stuck. I've been using the time to learn a bit of programming and just finished writing my first useful program. It is, of course, very basic, but it serves a purpose and I can actually imagine times where I would use it.
More than I can say for any of the programs we wrote in my two years of High School computer science. Not to mention it was done either in a highly specialized and practically useless language, or in Java. Both of which were okay to use, but not as broadly useful or conducive to learning as, say, any of the C languages.