First surprise of the morning: the scale showed 8|0. The notch was exactly in the middle. That woke me up, haven't seen it like this more than once in the last two years.
A surprise phone call... from Kale. For a moment I suspected he may be calling to appologize for not coming to mom's funeral or visiting at all, which my dad shoved into his face when he finally met him last week.
Nope, it was, after a short greeting and recognizing the voice, "what are you doing nowadays, are you busy with something". To which I answered with "That", pause, "is not your concern" (though, "to... te se ne tiče" sounds a bit harsher in serbian). Longer pause. Then he said „er... you're right“.
He was basically trying to offer me a job, or a gig, and that with sitting at his plant in Čurda. I recommended Željko, and then we went on to talk about the difference between the position of programmers here vs the US, mostly my monologue.
No way I would work for him. Not that I need a job, with the permanent gig at Firriver, but also not when this guy is sheer bad luck. First there was a failed job for him we tried to do from DBA, where he didn't really need anything we had to offer, and was asking for something we weren't actually capable of doing. Dunno whether Sale refunded him, but then Vanji and I felt obliged to smooth the rough relationship that remained, by offering a few standard apps of Avai at some discount. That ended with me riding a bicycle one day to his plant, where he put me in front of a PC with one of his guys, who was rather full of himself, wasn't really listening and generally the presentation flopped. But we have evened our debt of honor, so to speak.
I fixed a few bugs here and there, talked twice with Jan, and then there was a big team meeting at 15:05, with Nina's participation for the first time. Firriver was at its best, with Jan claiming there's too much on his plate, 103rd attempt to get organized better etc etc... though not even close to how it looked four years ago, when harsh words were spoken, headsets slammed on keyboards, conference left by some, and meetings lasted four hours. This one was quick, at just below 90 minutes, considering that we didn't have one in months.
And then we had "our team meeting", with Nina and then later Lena with voice and video, and Go with text only - she was on the job at the time. She and Stanley seriously plan to pay off his debt, let the kid grow for a few months, and then move to Serbia.