july 1987.: The basement tunnel
One thing we had to do with the basement was to provide a future tunnel from it into the house, so the pipes connecting the heating system would go that way. As the basement was some 60cm outside of the foundation frame, we had to build a roof and walls for it. We used some scrap wood, cut it to size and made something like a chair, plus two plates to hold the sides, which were held by just soil on the outside, then poured the concrete into it. The construction held, and we never removed the wood - couldn't, because the concrete went a bit around the edges of the 'roof' of it. Removed the inner sides only, that we could do.
Few years later, when we poured the slab on the foundation, the part where the tunnel would be was left unpaved. Didn't do that for the bathroom, though, so when it came to plumbing, I had to chisel out a sizable bit of concrete. But then we couldn't do this in advance, because the layout of the bathroom wasn't final in our heads yet. At least, at the time we had the walls and ceiling.
At some point afterwards, we came to do some work there (perhaps 1993, when we were laying down pipes for in-floor heating) and forgot the key to the front door. Couldn't open Johan's door (later the door between pantry and garage), because the key was stuck on the inside, so we got Nina, very thin at the time, to crawl through this tunnel and open the door from inside.
At the time the „Agrokomerc“ affair sprang out in public. It keeps looming a year ahead of this in my mind, but here the internets claim that it came up eventually this summer. I wouldn't have memorized the company's name were it not for the plum jam, because the label on the jar read boldly „ĐEM“, not džem. Đem is the iron piece of the harness that goes into a horse's mouth, fittingly. Had they spelled it right, I'd never remember their name, such were all over the place, those beginning with tehno-, metalo-, mašino-, agro- and angro- (en gross) and ending with -promet (traffic, throughput), -proizvod, -produkt (same but latin), -komerc, -projekt all sounded the same to me.
This turned out to be a grand IOU swindle. Fikret Abdić, director general of that kombinat, issued them to pay old debts and previous IOUs and to get some more money, raising stakes in each step. He took the successful „payment“ of preceding debts as an asset, proving his capability to pay, and it all went well until he went overboard and ran out of victims. „Politika“ ran a series of articles on the subject, and it keeps occurring to me that this was last summer, but I'm not the one to dig it out. What I do remember is that we were discussing this while digging the basement and tending to the two rows of onions in the back of the future yard - and yes, that couldn't have been this year, because that was now covered with huge piles of siporeks blocks.
The girls hit the more serious games on zx spectrum, played Oktup (there was a 'quake' in the actual name but can't remember the rest; the word oktup was one of the codes used to enter the levels), Three weeks in paradise (for which we eventually had to read the walkthrough from a magazine, because items used and places where to find them and where to use them were insanely unhinged, the guys must have had lots of fun writing that). For „Sabre wolf“... we drew the map by hand. Probably somewhere someone had a way to extract the same info but in real pictures from the code itself and have the same map as one big bitmap which would look as it did in the game. But give what you may, manual is okay. Don't know how long it took us to draw this, as each room had to be entered, enemies shot, paused, drawn in the map, times 256.
At this time we already surpassed the Manic miner and Jet Set Willy, we had the broken out versions with unlimited lives, which was done by breaking into the starting code written in basic, and adding two commands there to poke zeros into special locations, then saving the thus modified code on a cassette. We passed each game through to the end, knew every move by heart, the fingers would just dance by themselves. The best joke there was the second room in JSW, which was impossible to pass unless you held the move-left button pressed from beginnig to end of it. Completely counterintuitive, but we figured it out by ourselves, perhaps by accident.
Mentions: 27-VII-1986., kombinat, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), siporeks, ZX Spectrum, in serbian
17-XII-2019 - 25-III-2026