23-IX-1993.

Doing the interest calculus for the nearby Gik. Their HQ and erc occupied the upper floors of the sdk building. The famous M, who was the boss of erc until about '91 was now gone. She became famous among us for having bought a punch card reader in 1988 (!). The guys (Bogdan among them) celebrated the event by making a huge "WITH READER INTO XXI CENTURY!"... The same year when Presprom sold them a triglav with four terminals. Amazing.

Bogdan then went to the textile kombinat, and she was replaced with Mima, who then turned to be one more in the string of ladies who could just sit and watch me work (apart from the girls from stambena, there was an old lady from Presprom itself, and an accountant at ms, and a certain Marina at a village wholesale), amused by my concentration and the speed of fingers on the keyboard. This time I took this as a real compliment, she's a colleague, as much of a mathematician as I am.

Ту око *** нема ги падеж _гик:2 овди *** има пар причица. Прво, кад смо отишли да преговарамо, гле генерални директор... она замлата Црквењаков, знам га из буса, виђао сам га и по граду, и на оном позоришном фестивалу седамдездруге, исто фрајер шећеранац колико и ја, и он је сад директор... Крене он нешто да мрси ал' ајде, више је само одужио реда и препустио нас свом матором књиговођи.

There's a bit of a side story around Gik.

Ту је сад била малко смејурија. Ми као радимо главну књигу за *** нема ги падеж _гик овди ***, након што су већ имали, пре дваес година, удео у оном ИБМ 360, имали су екипу бре, ту је радио и *** нема ги падеж _средоја овди ***. После су имали и *** нема ги падеж _триглав:4 овди ***, ту су шефови били, редом, М. па *** нема ги падеж _бораГађански овди *** па сад *** нема ги падеж _гага овди ***... и овај матори прдоња из пензије сад треба као консултант да мени каже како треба да изгледа главна књига. Оно јеботе ко је овде луд, зар овде нико није видео апликацију за главну књигу? Мора да је било проблема са постојећим, да је то имало багова, јер је матори Шејек инсистирао на контролним извештајима, са све доносом са претходне стране. И нема везе што сам му објаснио да ће то увек да се слаже јер му дајем збир истих сабирака само другим редом, а ја, само ти то напиши, да ја имам дневник са тим пренетим збировима, то је мени контрола. Океј, увек могу да напишем симулацију ручног рада. Не вреди да му објашњаваш да неће *** нема ги падеж _фокс овди *** погрешити у сабирању (хоће, децембра, кад збир буде дужи од 16 цифара), ал' хоће прст да се омакне на тастатури, откуца се деветка уместо шестице и слично, и то ће да ти прође кроз ову контролу а и даље неће бити тачно. Урадио сам како је тражио. Само добар корисник је добар корисник.

*** нема ги падеж _гага овди *** се ту негде измигољила и отишла у *** нема ги падеж _машинска:4 овди *** да ради, а њен помоћник је напросто преузео посао. Био је занимљив лик, Лала из њеног села, висок, брадат и чудно ћутљив. И кад би нешто рекао, изгледало је као да је дуго размишљао како да употреби што мање речи. Ваљда што је стално гледао некуд у даљину, можда у ту нову стаклару преко.

The interest calculus was a big thing these years, due to ridiculous inflation. First it was something to scare customers into paying the base debt, but then things got serious. We had banks and lawyers and regular companies all trying to sue anyone they could, just to stop money rotting in pockets of others. The method was conform, i.e. with annual interest being recalculated into daily portions not proportionally, but rather as fractional exponent of the multiplying factor (the better explanation is in january 1989.). The whole thing was weird to the unitiated, which includes many bank managers.

It's not a cramped room, there's just many of us

I usually had a PC at home, because now we (DBA) could afford it and because there was lots of work to finish anyway. This also meant I had to have enough games for it - Prince of Persia was popular at the time, Tetris still strong, few 3d versions of it (something called Welltris, and blockout, of course).

In other news, the Robna kuća Beograd (Belgrade department store) on the main street closed recently. It was named Nama since forever, but very few remembered that it's an abbr. from „narodni magazin“ (people's stor[ag]e) Someone spillt the beans about them having some furniture on stock, so the state forced them to sell it at some three week old prices. They sold it all in two days and closed the shop. To that, Škrba says he heard of a guy who spent one whole salary to buy a corner set [of furniture], a television set and two cassetophones. I replied „there's gossip about a guy who bought a freezer box for less than a hundred morons [german marks] and when he unpacked it at home, found a color television inside. Just don't know whether that happened here or in Pančevo“.

Not to mention the movie[ theatre]s*... "Vojvodina?“ The lease ran out, and "Banat-film" didn't find the cash to extend it, so ZZ [farmers' cooperative] Zrenjanin leased it to "Šipad" [bosnian furniture and lumber]; now these guys having gone bust as well, I don't know what's in the hall now, in the lobby there's some boutique with models by Mirjana Marić. While "Šipad" was in there it was quite interesting, a furniture salon with sloped floor, except the stage on which the marital beds were :). On the ground floor (two floors below, on the very riverbank) is the amateur theatre and bar, "Drama workshop Centar", and beyond it the staircase leads up to pivnica.

Even the albanian bozadžija [boza being a soft drink of somewhat fermented corn farina] who worked the lobby, moved out together with the movie [theatre].

And the movie [theatre] "Avala" vanished under the magistrala, "Balkan" was converted into, I guess, some kind of disco, and kino garden also serves some hospitality business; there's a projector in the ninth community [centre] (don't know if it ever was a movie), and in the hall by šećerana (not working as a movie [theatre] for at least twenty years) and also in Dom (they do show them sometimes).

Go had continued the family tradition of pasting photos on the wall, or rather making a picture wall. There doesn't seem to be any underlying concept here, just to cover the wall as the wallpaper was close to crumbling from the moisture in the wall. The well is on the other side of that wall, and while it wasn't a source of any excess water, it's on a slightly raised platform, and the rainwater doesn't just flow away down the concrete path, it stays a long time and gets soaked by the wall. The concept, if any, was the bands she was listening to, which was probably NKotB at the time.

In DBA the shit, announced this summer, approaches the fan. Sale hired his own wife, with the explanation that the next big wad of money is in educating the users, and we only need a lecturer, which is exactly her. Of which nothing ever happened, not a single training course, not a lecture was ever held. She was preparing to be a programmer.

She was teaching informatics in the Dudek in Kikinda until then, and her travel expenses were bigger than her salary for months already. There were here students on sezam, so I got a bunch of stories about her. She taught Cobol from the sheets which Sale would prepare for her, and she'd copy the lines to the blackboard. Once they nicked her sheets and she didn't know what to do, left the class. Some other time they got the key to the cabinet [specialized classroom] and stayed after class to type exactly what she wrote on the blackboard and then compiled it. They got the typical 200 errors and brought her the listing with errors next time, allegedly they took it to someone's cousin at work. I remember Cobol being such a stupid, single-pass compiler which doesn't give up when it finds an unexpected word in a line, but rather reports the error and then goes on over the rest of the command, and of course it makes even less sense - same logic applied to m$'s on CP/M, or DEC's in stour. You start with 200 errors, fix three, 70 remain. Fix two more, 20 remain. Fix three more, three remain. Fix one, get twelve. Well, her code had so many errors that it would never pass. She, though, never understood why there were errors in the first place.

The school director let her know that the situation with her salary and travel expenses is unbearable, and told her to either move to live in Kikinda, or to find work at home. Didn't threaten to fire her, but it was clear enough.

So she laid an ultimatum to her husband, either find me a job in town or I'll go live in Kikinda. Because the travel expenses being so much above the professor's salary didn't make sense. He bragged to me later that there were several phone numbers he could have dialed to find her a job in five minutes, but he didn't want to mess with such things (because he knew he'd lose those numbers right there and who knows what kind of favor would he be indebted with). Instead, he hired her into DBA.

Soon an addendum to the news arrived from sezam: they made her a glorious farewell party. To which they didn't even invite her.

So the downfall of the company began.

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* sorry but have to clear the ambiguity - in english, "movie" may mean the piece shown and a place where it's shown; "theatre" may mean live actors or a cinematic show. It's clear in serbian, three separate words: '"film" - movie piece; "pozorište" - theatre (live action), "bioskop" - theatre (cinematographer)

Mentions: january 1989., Interest calculus, Aleksandar Raskov (Sale), blockout, Bogdan Levacki, DBA, Dom omladine, Dražen Jerić (Dudek), erc, Gik, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), kombinat, Majkrosoft (m$), Marina Čikezin, Merima Tabarski (Mima), ms Rašetić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), pivnica, Presprom, sdk, sezam, stambena zadruga, stour, šećerana, triglav, in serbian

22-X-2020 - 5-IX-2025