Putting it in another perspective, perhaps that experience made you appreciate programming and software industry more. It might be a high price you paid (the years of pseudo useless studies), but you'll think twice when considering to change industries.

I worked in sales for a few years and even became a regional sales manager before switching to programming 12 years ago. Now, whenever I see the IT related problems (like bad programming parctices, lousy code, bad architectures and so on), I remember how bad and really unfixable things can be (for me as an employee) in the rest of the industries and love programming even more.