28th on sezam:
Owner of a small workshop in a busy street here complains that he has to wash his shop window frequently, as it's always spat on. First he had Sloba's picture, then someone from the wannabe royal family, then I dunno whom, it's still spat on.
Don't know what was in the window last I saw it. The glass was broken at leg height.
These days (perhaps the month before) I made a few trips to Vršac, on one of DBA's new yugos. The fuel situation being as it was, I carried a 5l canister of spare fuel, so I don't get stranded on the way back. The gasoline signal light permanently stayed on. Perhaps it's because this was the one with 85l tank, I wouldn't know, I don't even know where the extra volume was. All the same, it took me there and back flawlessly, and I never used the extra fuel. The traffic was so sparse, I'd see perhaps four vehicles altogether on those 100km.
One of the customers was the chocolate factory. Well if in the dairy plant they'd bring coffee, plate of cheese and fresh yogurt, these guys would bring coffee and a plate of chocolate shards - all those broken bars need not go to waste. The two-wing door which led to their big office, where the PCs were, was only half open. Unexpected, I thought the girls would all need both wings open to come in. But no, they were all slim. The one assigned to me, ie. the one which was supposed to use what I installed (interest calculus, IIRC), said that it takes about a month to go through phases of chocolate nirvana first, then just enjoying it from time to time, to complete blase disinterest. Now it can be any special kind of chocolate, they don't bite. Doesn't attract them anymore.
She was an interesting person, with cunning eye and bosnian charm - a refugee, as I heard - and we did talk some when I gave her a ride to Plandište, on the way back. I went there only twice, so don't even remember her name.
The other customer was a local bank there, dunno how we got that, perhaps word of mouth from the little bank in Plandište. They didn't need any big app, they wanted one special routine, to calculate interest on any amount over time, what with payments or additional loans meanwhile, but with some special stipulations - there should be a revaluation of the capital, to be used as the base for the actual interest, but not to count as capital until the end. Or some such cockamamie scheme, with actually two more stipulations that I can't remember. That was my longest routine ever, don't remember how many lines, perhaps two thousand. The guy who was the liaison office was actually an old and seasoned code wolf, the boss of their erc, and just couldn't be bothered to write it himself. He probably knew all the vagaries of Cobol, and just decided that he doesn't need that kind of shit this late in the carreer.
He also gave me a 5,25 inch floppy, formatted and written on a Partner, that they just couldn't read on any PC, because of the special 644 kilobyte format. He said if we could read it, they'd pay handsomely, as it would save them a lot of retyping - some stuff had to be transfered frequently, waste of time.
I eventually found a way to read it, using some russian int3.com file I found on sezam, which would simply take over interrupt three and report okay for just any kind of floppy you put in. Beyond that, it was a matter of finding the EOF on each file, because the lengths were rounded up to the whole last used block. Couldn't sell them that simply because I didn't know how to wrap it into something resembling an app. Can't pack, can't sell. Let them retype.
On the way back from my last trip from that bank (could be december as well) I got a hitchhiker in Trbnjevo. In police uniform. Could be a routine check, I know I didn't do anything wrong. Turns out it's the cop who works there, off duty now, returning home, and the buses are sparse these months, one never knows if they'll have the fuel or not. So I picked him and in the remaining thirty kilometers heard a cartful.
First they had no local policemen, it's below the montagnari's dignity to be a cop, they're the harsh warriors from the steep mountaintops and narrow valleys. All of them were from the city. Just two years before, there were no local cops at all, all were commuting 20-30km to work, because it was below the bar for locals to be cops.
Once it happened that someone was being too violent in the tavern, so he resisted arrest (would have been taken out to calm down, perhaps to spend the night in the station to sober up) and knocked out the cop. The cop called for backup when he got up from the floor, and then they arrested this guy. The drunken mob aroused their friends, drank some more, and then staged a full siege of the station, the one and only such case in the whole history of former SFRY.
The village is under scientific scrutiny. There are (widely spread) rumors that, in order not to split the land, they inbred a lot and have an abnormally high percentage of idiots, high enough to have raised scientific interest - and that's without counting those they hide in basements and attics.
At this time he was the last cop from the city who still worked there. Now when Sloba's wars began, everyone there wanted to be a cop - which is a nice way to pretend to serve the country while staying safe at home.
I've heard the story of inbred idiots several times, even 25 years later.