After the big success of our import - the machines were selling fast, every week we'd deliver a few - we merited a visit by the representative of the manufacturer. They were two, taiwanese Chineses, with english first names and chinese surnames. I remember the guy talking about the current state of electronics, saying that a complete tape recorder is already so small, for years now, it could be inserted into the cassette. The only reason it's still as big as it is is the required size of the buttons and the speaker.
The other thing - I asked about chopsticks. I'm relatively proficient with them, but... how does one know a master? What should you be able to do to pass for one? "Lift two peanuts", he said. Which I've seen done, seventeen years later, by our daughters.
Vanji and Sale took them for dinner somewhere, no clue where. Never saw them again. The company name, Acrotech, is even ungooglable - there are dozens of companies with similar names, and even their IPC brand is not protected, the acronym applies to a dozen other things.
Few years later, we used A from their logo as a base for the logo of Avai.
Grgi gave up on waiting for the corolla and bought a second-hand fiat 132. It rode quite well, and I rode with him several times, when both office Yugos were elsewhere on field work. I recounted once at home how he becunted and simply stepped on the pedal and passed the strangler in front of him, who then must have taken down saints from the sky* because he had the intentrion to pass the slow truck himself first. I said „and Grgi cursed him back, too bad they couldn't hear each other“. For which Nina came up with a solution - she drew a baloon, as in a comic strip, with „#@!#☈#“ etc, glued it to cardboard and we even made a stick for it so it could be raised. That's, she said, when you want to curse the guy behind, just raise this so he can see it. Grgi liked this a lot, took the sign and kept it in his car, eventually put it to good use a few times.
He had a body job on the fiat the next winter, because he hit a pole... at neckbreaking 15 km/h. He simply happened to be over sheer ice plate and could do absolutely nothing, the beast weighs a ton and then some.
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* i.e. cursed from a list
20-I-2020 - 19-X-2025