Field work in Sombor. Ileš is not the boss there anymore, he went solo, dealing with hardware. He's become some sort of DBA's sales agent in the area, got us a bunch of customers, mostly agricultural production. His replacement is just as capable and gets us into the Gradska kafana (city tavern, in a corner of the ancient city hall, where the barbecue occupies a circle in the middle of the big room, with the bar around it it's about 3m wide), but that's usually at the time when we're dead tired, around 18:00 (they work until 15:00, but she stays with us, and perhaps a couple of accountants). There were times when we'd arrive at 7:00, or once at 9:00 but after visiting a customer at the romanian border first, then getting a phone call with change of plan.
The big thing I was doing at this time is automatic ledger from sales/invoicing into main. Everything has to go to some special account, each tax by category etc, plus there were a bunch of special cases. It was buggy in the beginning, but in the long run saved them a lot of time. This already worked for a while; today the boss just told me to remove some exception which doesn't work anymore. Since 28th of may until 9th of july next year there was some special 3% tax for cases when there was coffee on the invoice. The coffee indicator was not tied to the invoice, but to the buyer (!). The rebate was calculated differently for certain categories of cases (internal customers from within the system?). The value of the tax had to be rounded to two decimals, and the value of the goods was calculated as total value minus tax, not as price times quantity, to head off rounding errors.
As of february 1993 the account 120 (suppliers?) wasn't to be split by regions (why was it and what regions?).
Versions of this routine were spread across many customers, even those who never used it. Found it even in Acc157, which doesn't have any goods, invoicing or warehousing - simply, it was something that came with main ledger, and was turned off for most. In special cases, it would be adjusted to the local accounting scheme.
In many cases the accountant wouldn't have it at all, distrustful of anything making entries in the ledger without their full control. On the other side there were those who knew their own rules, and how to tell us what goes where. Once they saw how errors from invoicing are transfered, but then how once corrected the next run of automatic would correct it in the ledger too, they were extremely happy and never looked back.
Someone called the Surčin airport, to see whether a certain airplane had arrived. The response he got was "Buddy, this is where not even birds land anymore".
Nina or Go brought the news that the school year would begin a month earlier, on 1st of august, and the winter holiday would be extended by a month - because of the heating. (didn't happen, but sounded plausible at the time)
In Nina's class there's a little black boy. Refugee from Zagreb.