Around mid-july we held a larger meeting in the Dom (well, Home of Youth isn't it anymore, too many offices and altogether still too new, evern after thirteen years), with the folks from SSOJ, Bogdan, director of Students', Mika Fišer, the guy from the bank with whom I'll write the elaborat, and a few stragglers, including a montagnar from petefi who had "interesting ideas" (I'd hazard to guess it was a good mix of wishful thinking, scientific approach withoug knowing the base facts on the ground, and the mountaineers "it's easy" logic). Recounted what we saw in Ljubljana.
On 22nd Bogdan came in the afternoon, and while he wasn't nominally a member of the founders' team, he was one of the guys I was counting on. In a discussion with him we came to a decision on the name of the company, and developed the conception some more.
At the time, he moved from Gik to the textile kombinat, which bought the building where the elementary school used to be (where she had a room as a student), and installed a huge old IBM cupboard, with several disks of about 340M capacity, each housed in its own washer-sized box. They bought it second hand from the croatian police, and the guys didn't even bother to erase the disks. Who knows what secrets could be gleaned and sold from there... He invited me to go and work there. Few months before that I may even have thought about it; now with the DBA in the making, it was a no contest.
There will be a general break in the activities around the future company, as I'll be on a vacation from 30th to 20th of august.
Inventory in Presprom. The circus lasted for days. A problem arose because in the app we never had any inventory entry form, the document type never existed in our tables, but they managed. Then they saw they fucked up here and there, then managed to workaround the issue and fucked up even worse. Then when they finally reported the problem, they kept evading the details, how did those records get there and what did they manipulate and how. They had a strong culture in that regard, we would usually never find out what happened and specially who did it. So Radoja and I sat and analyzed the records they created, having trouble to understand how the fuck they managed to create them in the first place, no entry form can do that... except, perhaps... hmmmm... oh fuckit, did they really... So we somehow divined what they did and how, and I sat to write an inventory result entry form - to remove from stock what was found missing, to add to it what was found in excess.
Later we heard what the inventory taking looked like, in real life, with the additional presence of some inspector. One of the problems was that they missed a few cartons of „Opatija“ (cigarettes). The price changed since then, so to fit the value they wrote off two and a half cartons (!). They also wrote off 30% of value of the calendars for 1984 and 20% of those for 1985 (that the calendars are worthless now didn't cross anyobody's mind). Eventually the remaining sticking point on which the inspector insisted was a liter of brendi*, which they confessed was drunk by the inventory taking commission. He just looked at them significantly and signed the minutes.
While I wrote that entry form, their chief of AOP (electronic data processing) aka erc was sitting with me, one Magdolna, who wasn't looking the sexy chick she must have been 20 years ago, but was trying hard to keep up. Her surname was Mazalica (a lubricator, or a lubricating nozzle on a slide bearing; also „mazati“ means to smear, spread in layer), which the two from stambena took as a nickname, which she got after the amount of makeup she applied. But no, it's a surname, she said her maiden was Kišprdilai (kiš - hungarian for small, prd - root of all fart related words, so smallfart) and she hoped to fix that by marrying a Bosnian... She was probably the first in the line of elderly ladies who'd love to just sit and watch me work, guess because I was so concentrated and not looking at where my fingers were flying.
The whole shenanigan lasted two to three days (on our side) and cost me a lot of nerve, hey, that's Presprom, they have the habit of being up to date within hours, and sitting her next to me was a means of pressure, no matter how chummy she was and how much fun we had. A week or two later I noticed my first gray hair, not on my scalp but on my chest, right on the heart. That was that inventory.
Speaking of cooperatives, around this time Presprom sold yet another triglav to the stambena in Vršac, so we four (Radoja, me, and the two colleagues, perhaps the colorblind guy too) went there to install the app we had here. We brought everything on floppies, sat in Radoja's lada, and made the paltry 100km in no time. Along the way I noticed the sunflowers neatly turned... away from the sun, flower facing north. What the fuck is this? Asked the colleagues whether they see what I see... I mean, the sunflower is called so because it turns its flower to the sun, and now it does the opposite. Ah, the colleague said, that's dr Vrebalov, the geneticist, they messed with it to gain more seeds, which worked, and this counter turn is just a side effect.
Paused at the motel in Plandište, for a coffee, and he and I went to take a leak. On the way back he asked „so how was the firstie**?“. „Well can't quite remember, the early morning was long ago, and I don't have the habit to estimate the quality of my pee“. „Didn't ask about that, but about the brandy I brought overyester“.
When we got there, it turned out that we got everything except the batch files, scripts to put the app together, which contained menus, that was the user shell then. Well, it can't be so hard... so I sat down and wrote them from scratch in half an hour. Saved the day...
The first day at a customer is usually long, there's lots to explain to the staff, so we finished eventually around six. Then they took us to Leskovčanin for dinner. That's when I first saw what an imaginative cook may mean... This guy invented the „leskovac train“, or maybe he saw it from his mentor, or just heard about it and reinvented it. It's mixed meat, i.e. mostly from barbecue but in waves - whenever you're almost finished with one dish, the next one arrives. Another new item, meat in long fiber, ruffled like yarn, almost like a broom, which is never done, who can chew it when it's so long, it's always cut to make the fibers short. But no, this is just like that, you take it in chewable amounts, and it's not that bad at all. What'll they invent next. Thirty plus change years later I learned that this is officially called „drpana prasetina“ (ragged piglet meat, known in english, I guess, as pulled pork, if that's the same thing). The dinner was, indeed, large and plentiful, and the colleague, likewise large, said just „I dined and hope yet again“.
Meanwhile, on 10th, there was the first „truth rally“ of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo in Novi, organized by Sloba and The Service, where the province government of Vojvodina was to be depicted as separatist (i.e. trying to turn the province into a direct member of the federation, just like the Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija were demanding), thus driving a wedge between it and the people. This was the first step in Sloba's takeover, but so oblique and roundabout that nobody really understood where it led.
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* I intentionally spelled it phonetically, as brendi, because it's not brandy (rakija), which is a fruit destilate. Brendi is supposed to be a wine destilate, a wannabe cognac, but in those years all of the popular brands had fancy unphonetic names (like „Stock 84“, which everyone pronounced štok, as if german... well, it was german originally) and bottles but were actually artificial drinks, pure fakes, industrial alcohol plus stuff to make taste
** „prvenac“, which means the first one of something - primarily the firstborn. He meant the bottle of brandy taken from the still immediately after the methanol stopped.
12-XI-2021 - 16-V-2026