june 1987.
Took the girls to dad's vineyard. Raised a little tent, took some pictures. Had a good time.
One of these months I went to Trbnjevo to install the new financial app (whether it was my port of the official one we had written for pdp, or whatever Antal was pretending to do, don't remember) on their Partner. Installed, it kind of worked, then changed the oour name and address in report headers, recompiled and relinked them (yes, in m$ Cobol, grrrr), then wanted to try them and turned the printer on. The whole house lost power. Huh? What happened? Ah, we didn't tell you and you were too fast. You have to turn the printer on first, while the computer is turned off, or else it blows the fuse. What? What kind of installation do you have here? Is it safe at all? Ah, no problem with the wires - the whole house was on fire last year and the wires stayed intact.
Sure enough, the machine developed a disk fault, somewhere on its ten megabytes (9.4 formatted), and I never managed to finish this. Later I described it as a "long race, and you see the finish line approaching, and then your engine just falls off".
Had a similar problem with the Partner in stambena. The guy from Iskra Delta, however, claimed that it's the app's problem. Why? The messages weren't in english. Sure enough, I translated them. I disassembled the error file, wrote translations instead, reassembled, inserted instead of the original and that was it. Just wanted to avoid all the trouble of operators trying to read english to me over the phone.
So he just packed his toys and went home. It took several phone calls for him to come again, then finally run some test on the disk and find a dozen faults. They fixed it eventually, probably replaced the disk. I doubt they had any time or way to fix a disk then - even less now.
Around this time it once happened that our side of the main street lost power. As usual in such cases, we tried to call Elektrovojvodina. The very lack of response, nobody took the call after several tries, was a sufficient sign. They have a big problem, and nobody knows when will they fix it. The operator girls were already milling along the main street. Screwy position, having a job downtown and not having time to check out the shop windows, now's the chance. We guys didn't care much about that. After second coffee (did Zlata have a gas rešo too?), around eleven, Radoje dismissed us and told us to just call once per hour to check whether we got power back. Which we did. Toured the cafes in Gimnazijska, and duly called home before ordering the next round. The power didn't come until the end of hours, and we got solidly drunk.
In about third cafe I spotted the two operator girls from stambena sitting at the other end. Went to greet them, and, drunk as I was, admitted to the nicer one that I was this close to falling in love with her few months ago. Which then lasted about two minutes, but didn't say that. Enough that I remembered it, and there girl, there's a compliment for you.
I stumbled a lot while getting on my bike, but once I mounted it, I didn't need legs too much. The ass does the balancing, legs only pedal, it's easier than walking. Got home just fine.
Mentions: Antal Sič, Majkrosoft (m$), oour, Partner, PDP, Radoje Maletin, rešo, stambena zadruga, Trbnjevo, in serbian