My first day of work, at 13.. Walked to the bus station, where I waited for the van for Perlez. Got acquainted with the colleagues along the way. There were at least two others who were also newbies - one fellow mathematician, a nice girl, and Mišo.
I did my six classes, and then probably ate something in Trpeza, because I had more classes in the afternoon. The schedulers in both schools (actually oours of the same school) probably got me in late, so I had a very weird schedule - ten classes on monday (and an empty one late in the afternoon), which amounted to a 12-hour workday with two breaks, then some on tuesday, two places on wednesday (though a lot shorter in the afternoon), then a bit on thursday, maybe just two classes, and a friday off.
I got through it without any stage fright. Well, maybe first two minutes, but that was covered by paperwork, taking headcount (so I'd get accustomed to their names). The day just whizzed by, and what Slave said when I called and asked what's the catch, how to pass through the first days, that your legs begin to hurt - didn't happen. I somehow got the habit from this first day to just walk and talk, and it wasn't hard. It was just that the day was long and when I got home in the evening, I sat and felt my upper body swing back and forth. I fell asleep like a suckling.
There was a sink in the coffee kitchen next to the staff room, with glicerine soap, somewhat translucent. Allegedly protects your skin against the chalk. There I got my first cultural shock, when one of the cleaner ladies asked, addressing me in plural, „professor, do you want a coffee?“. This is when it hit me, after eight classes I already held, that I am a professor now. Just two years ago the cleaners were to be feared, they'd shout and berate anyone who'd try to walk down the hall when it was freshly mopped and not dry yet. They perhaps spared the professors, but the students and assistants were a regular target. The staff room coffee wasn't bad at all, and it came right on time, when so much talk starts getting to one's head.
Much later, I'll have the time to get disappointed with the kids' lack of knowledge and work habits. There wasn't much I could do about it, they were thoroughly screwed in the elementary school.
This Perlez division made me get up really early on mondays and wednesdays, because the van which was taking us would pass here at about seven in the morning. I'd wait for it on the corner by the busodrome, about ten minutes' walk from home. The street to there is almost regular, unpaved but at least has a sidewalk. The near part of it goes by bager and the sidewalk is on the other side; then in the other half there are just a couple of houses and the sidewalk switches to follow the fences of the yards of Naftagas and Autobanda. That sidewalk was nasty - no light, elevated maybe 25cm above the road, narrow and uneven, and interrupted by two gates. It somehow managed to be covered with a thin layer of mud whenever there was rain in a hour's ride distance.
I quickly understood what's wrong with the van - it was built on a chassis of a two ton truck. So the suspension was designed for four times the weight, and the seats were as for village bus. Luckily, this is the belgrade road, not so bad. And the heating was good, helped a lot when the winter came.