This on sezam
A neighbor was in the electoral committee. Says it was awful - the owners of the space polling station was had no idea it was assigned as one, so it had to be set up quickly (it's a warehouse with a few tons of merchandise). Half of the committee members didn't show up anyway, so they invented substitutes. The municipality didn't provide fuel, let alone transportation, so they had to find a way to feed the materiel to it in the end. They didn't even get the seventh ballot (there was a local referendum on renaming the city) so they had to go get that too.
In the municipal HQ of the committee it was raw chaos - 300 people in one room. Says they stayed until 4 counting the ballots, there was no coffee, not even mineral water, except BYO. Says this is the last time he took part in elections.
I don't quite remember when we started doing the book for the old cardiologist. I know we had our own laser printer, an Aitchpee three or four, I'm bad with names, which weighed some 20kg. Ah, yes, we had it a few months already at DBA, having done that newspaper on it for seven weeks, which ended by now. After the glorious outcomes of all our desktop publishing endeavours, including that 1990 tourist guide, this newspaper and a few elementary school leaflets, where we almost came out even by not investing much more in it than our (my) own time, this time we were the publishers. Shoving our own money into it. How did Sale get it into his head, where did he find profit, is beyond me.
I've spent hours and hours with the old man, stoking ventura, and still can't remember his name. He addressed me with „young mister“, probably bewildered with the hairy and fuzzy bloke who knows how to do these things, but I guess he's already seen all kinds at the hospital. Retired now, he decided to systematize the knowledge he gathered. Even though I retyped all of it, I still remember nothing from the book, except that it lacked any novelty or breakthrough, it was all a rehash. The nice part was that I only had to leave the space for photographs (unfortunately, had to type the captions below them), and he'd glue them to the final print and take that to printers. No scanning, the better, the scanners only introduced more moiree at the time, being relatively low rez.
I probably managed to finish this before moving into the new space. One of the fond memories of the first weeks there under was the half of cubic of books stacked in the middle passthrough office, that nobody knew what to do with. The old guy didn't care at all, he got published and his career was completed; we have expanded our field of operations into publishing and... not that we haven't sold much, it's rather than within a month we ran out of victims to shove free copies to, they all already had one from the author himself.
The net result was purely in the red, I have pissed away some hundred of hours during which I could have done something useful. There's a small consolation that I had that less of field work.