The last time I donated blood, that I have in the booklet. Should be actually some 24th time or thereabouts, as I gave a couple of times in Novi, which isn't registered in this one, or some such informational snafu.
This time we (Avai, that is) were doing the CAT5 cabling in the city hospital. I had some work at the construction office, the HosTract needed an update. This didn't take long, so I went to the unfinished main building to see how our engineer is holding. Without much discussion he handed me a roll of UTP cable, he took another one, and we carried it upstairs somewhere, and then he started threading them through the cable tunnels... in general, we laid perhaps six lines until he thought we had done about enough for the day. Then he packed and said he was a bit hungry. I felt the same and said I'm taking him to some sandwiches downstairs in one of the old buildings. I took him to transfusion, to donate blood. He went all pale, olive green, cyan green, then just pale again and said he can't stand the needle. OK, then you just wait until I'm done then we go back to the office, OK?
He went pale again when he saw me lying on the high cot, with a line in my vein dripping into a bag. But then he recovered after two sandwiches. They always had good sandwiches at transfusion.
Around this time Go just came with a CD of Jethro Tull, actually not their album, just a „the best of“, not really a bad selection of songs, and said „now you see on what will we play this“. That's dad's girl, knows the most direct roundabout way...
So over the next few months I saw to it that I get a sound card and a CD drive. Both belonging to Avai, of course, there's less taxation on hardware paid from company's account, than when that passes through payroll, when it gets burdened with some 60% of total tax, social security (still covering both health and retirement) and whatnot.
For the speakers, I cannibalized the old tape recorder, and fit them into plastic boxes, which were actually designed to keep food sealed in the fridge. Branko soldered the jacks for me, to a simple phone twisted pair, and that was it.
The trouble came next year, when we went on buying CDs on the street, mostly from Loba's kum, who had a stall on the main street, and later also from Go's then boyfriend (or was that in 1998?), who even had a regular brick-and-mortar, though hole-in-a-wall shop, just about 200m from Žitni square, on the main street going our way.
The trouble was that it started skipping. Specially the same album by Moody Blues, called „the legend of a band“, which was actually another thebestof, with perhaps a couple of newer songs. That one would skip, though not like a vinyl record player, this would apply algorithms and compensate for errors, patching rough spots the best it could, rebuilding missing info with that from last ten seconds, sticking to the rhythm, but in the end it would revert to the last known good part, and would inevitably play eleventh song ad nauseam, or would play to the eleventh one and then resume play from ninth, in an endless loop. Lena said „your computer has a soul... plays the song it likes“. The „has a soul“ went straight into the house dictionary.
I knew the CD drives were not the best quality, it's all šverc komerc*, from who knows where, I don't care which label was on the box, so I kept complaining, and by the end of 1998 the poor guys at CompuWiz replaced my CD drive five times. Until it finally dawned on me that it can't be that all these drives are equally bad, it could be that there's a problem with the disk itself, specially seeing that the problem is always on the same spot. Only when it became public that almost all those, allegedly original, CDs were bulgarian fakes, it became clear that, um, yes, the disks were bad. I did check the printing of the sleeves, and did find some misalignment of colors here and there, but then I did find such things on official licenced album sleeves here, so it didn't look any worse, I thought these were honest contraband from Austria or so. Well, well...
At least we had music in the house again, as Go had arrested the old Pioneer sound system and it was now permanently in their room, so now we'd let the CD play all night. Only about 70 minutes of music, but still better than silence.
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* rhymes nicely. „contraband commerce“