Some guy (actually Pop's brother-in-law) created a competition to the local weekly newspaper, even though that was a tough sell. He financed up to seven issues, and DBA was the technical support, i.e. I was. It ran to eight pages of newspaper format, ventura worked overtime (much smoother on a 386), and I had my allnighters six or seven times with the gentlemen of the press, starting on a sunday afternoon and ending on a monday morning. No matter how more skillful we got over time, it still ended with a morning coffee from Milka's hand.
That is, it was mostly glodur* and I who stayed to the end, the other would clear an hour or two earlier. It happened in, say, forelast** issue that we triple-checked each text typos - well, the texts where we knew we always had them; the rest only double-checked, until we couldn't found any more. Whether our eyes gave up, or there really weren't any, same difference, we concluded that the text was clean. We'd leave the zero version, the one with everything glued in place, on the table, then printed it again and glued (the printer was A4, this was larger, so ventura printed it piecemeal and we had to crop and paste) the final version. At 6:30 the owner of the magazine would come to pick it and take it to Belgrade, to print in Borba's printshop.
Around seven the DBA starts coming to work, and the zero version is still on the middle table, and Grgi notices, straight from the door, a glaring typo in a caption on the front page. Texts were possibly clean...
Doing everything in DOS, we had all the filenames in 8.3 format, so the anglers corner text, "kutak za ribolovce", was named kuzari.txt... and starting from third issue we started addressing the staff as "how's it goin', kuzari?".
The political situation was, in mildest terms, thickening. The travelling circus, where the presidents of the republics met now here now there and kind of negotiated a settlement of the federation to everyone's satisfaction, was visibly going into three mother's cunts, and provocations were multiplying, specially between Serbia and Croatia. I got a strong impression that it was a deal between them, that they'd pass the ball to each other intentionally. For example (don't know when exactly, perhaps this spring or back in winter) I saw a movie on TV with cyrillic subtitles. Which was my pet peeve for years - cyrillic being allegedly equal but almost absent from the TV, even the credits on the coverage of Vuk's Sabor were in latinic, and there was never ever any foreign language thing with cyrillic subtitles. And now they finally appear, on some buccaneer movie which is broadcast for the whole serbocroatian region. Which is a let's stick them to them Croats. Then the Zagreb television (or was it already renamed into Croatian Radio Television - HRT) appologizes to its viewers for having to see cyrillic script on their screens. So to stick it to them Serbs. Not to mention what football matches were like at the time, I never watched that but heard a bunch of stories.
And once before the staff meeting, having gathered outside on the parking and slowly going in, I said they can't possibly invent so much shit which would stop me from feeling this great when the spring comes, just taking a look at it can disperse all that. Fuck yourselves with your politics, I feel fine because it's spring.
Most of the staff I never met before or after. One guy I marched with a few years later at a protest; another one was a co-founder and eventually the last owner of CompuWiz; one reporter girl was in the team which did the tourist guide - see 04-X-1989..
Some time during the same period Grgi and I went to Kikinda several times, because the customers there multiplied. A guy from some society owned firm, which was our customer already, had founded, with a partner, a wholesale firm, which consisted of two room offices, three telephones and two computers, 286s, one of which had a gray and the other a yellow (aka amber) monitor. Whoever drove to there would get the machine with the amber one, because it was so tiring the eyes that it was better that he doesn't drive back, regardless of it being only 50km.
Society owned firms didn't want to deal with the privatniks, partially for political reasons, because we were still somehow a socialist country, and partly because they knew who they'd be dealing with, these guys were mostly the same kind of scum as they were themselves, different only for managing to rob their own oour, ruin it and then buy it off with the stolen dough. These two guys seemed to have made a modest start, from nearly nothing, by selling goods someone promised, and paying it only after their customer paid. In these couple of months they did this enough times to make enough margin to be able to pay the rent, computers and some chick who'd do the data entry.
To gain easier access to the societal firms, they named theirs „24th february“, which was no date for people's liberation fight, it was a date from this year, when they were founded. The custom to name a firm after a date was pure socrealism, at least until then, and nobody dared confess not knowing what was the important event of that day after which the firm is named, so it was assumed that they were a societal firm too, which opened for them several doors which would have remained closed otherwise.
The partners were, of course, quite the Bosančeros, and by the time of our second visit one of them dragged to the other room, so I could explain something to him. There he said his partner is not to be trusted, so he plans to split the company and they'd go their separate ways. And now if tomorrow I'm a separate firm, what software do I need? Well, I said, you being wholesale, you'd need goods accounting aka warehousing, and just any firm out there has to have a main ledger. He looked at me seriously, pointed at the bookshelf and said: „look, I have many ledgers here, which one is the main one?“.
Don't know what happened later. Too bad, they had a perfect location, the street at the edge of downtown, where the trees on both sides put their crowns together and adamantly refuse to let any sunshine warm the cars beneath.
These months we often went even further south, to Čoka and Kneževac, where we got hold of few more customers. Some of it was related to the meat kombinat there, or rather with two teams which splintered from it. One was some guy Šaca Unimaks (or whatever his shop was called) , who had a slaughterhouse in one village, a cold storage in another (but on the other side of Tisa), and then even a throwout division in Segedin. He was a bit distrustful first, but I disarmed him at first sight, when we visited him at his home, where I asked at the fence door „will the pooch?“ [bite], in pure old banatian speak... which was quite incongruous with my hair and beard, and Grgi behind me wasn't too different, I guess he already grew a beard at the time. That's where I first (and only) time tried a sausage of horse meat. A bit sweetish, but not bad at all.
The other outfit was called Mafia, an acronym of the three partners' names, Maćaš, Fića and Andraš, who all used to be some shots in that kombinat (even took us to dinner there in the basement of the old castle, where the kombinat's HQ was, they had a very good fish čorba), and then went privateering. Their explanation of a diskont (discount shop), said „draw a line across the floor here, and account the goods which are on this side as belonging to the diskont, and the other side is not. And then it depends on who you sell to, under which terms, so you may evade this or that tax by taking the goods down this or that path, all legal, so it depends only on the corner of the room from which you sell“.
They also went into some production, started making oblatne (waffle crust sheets, local recipe), and also opened a coffee roasting shop. Those roasters are multiplying, they pop up everywhere (few years later one will open in the house where, years later, the detelina will be), just walk down any neighborhood and be hit by the fragrance at random... They explained that the raw coffee is the perfect merchandise, it doesn't mold, can take moisture, doesn't need any special storage conditions, may be stored indefinitely, and its price holds. The fuckup was in the required knowledge of types, because there are three of them - the southamerican, aka brazilian or columbian minas, then african robusta and yet another kind from India. Each contributes to taste and experience - some the fragrance, some the strength, some the foam... And that's where our newlybaked merchants screw it by bying pure A grade columbian, the best one, and it fails to deliver because it's missing everything else. Or they do buy all kinds but third league, because it's known that we're a low rent market, you can sell any kind of shit here, if it's cheap enough. Wrong, these guys also fell flat. Because it may be true that you can sell any crap here, we may dress in cheapest rags and drive rusty clunkers, but there's no people more spoiled about their coffee. It must be a proper blend of exclusively prime league components, anything below that won't pass. Many broke their bludgeons on that.
There was a legendary story from the old kombinat about the quail pašteta. Someone asked
- is that really pure quail pašteta?
- of course not, there's beef in it.
- how much beef then?
- half.
- what, fifty kilos of each in a hundred?
- not by weight, it's apiece, one quail, one bull.
- so how do you acquire quails?
- it flies through the production hall from time to time, and then if we catch it...
The other tale was about the showroom, the audience hall where they'd have folklore shows, movies or larger meetings. They put there new light fixtures, all neon, and one tube just won't shine. They replaced five tubes, and several starters, which all worked fine in other sockets, but not in this one. Then some older majstor comes along and says he'll fix it, on the condition of one crate of beer and him being alone in the hall while fixing it, everybody out. They did so, and only when half of that crate was drunk, he told them the trick - he shortened the power cable a couple of millimeters. Because sometimes it happens that there's a standing wave with the tube being exactly at its node. Changing the length of the cable either makes the wave moving or moves the node elsewhere.
These months we often dropped by Dragutinovo, which was almost along the way when going in that direction, into the firm Prvi polet (First takeoff, or rather elan), which was just another [one] among the two hundred such wholesale companies. This one was rather serious, the guy I guess tore down the barn and built a very tall warehouse in two levels, and on top of it a line of offices for management and, of course, computers. Additionally, downstairs, on the street, he had a bookstore too, and also published a literary magazine, named similarly to the firm. The firm was abuzz, and needed lots of software. My app was the main ledger with analytics, while Grgi had the merchandise warehousing. Which doesn't quite make sense, I came from wholesale, the warehousing should be my area of expertise, but then there were various novelties in it, the nivelations and whatnot, so this is how it now was. We also got two girls who will use our apps, one Vladislava and Marina, both of them not just cute but real candy, though the former, assigned to Grgi, spoke nasally often, spoiling the impression. This Marina developed a habit to lean all the way down to her (always left) side of the desk, her head on its top board, and regard me and what I was doing, from that angle. She finished, or almost finished, some higher teachers' school, to be a kindergarten teacher, which wouldn't earn her much bread anytime soon, the kindergartens weren't expanding, so she'd have to wait for one to retire and hopefully not be replaced with someone with a strong connection. And as for silently watching me, while I didn't think I was any kind of rock star and went full tilt blase, I did have such fans already, she wasn't the first, so I learned to pay no attention to them long ago. Specially seeing how half of such ladies were at least ten years older than me.
This, though, it smelled like... um, well, Grgi was single, and these two persuaded thir boss, once when we stuck quite long and kept working deep into the afternoon, to treat us a lunch in the local restaurant. The village is largish, there's even some industry, and a local hardware guy, so the restoran was at an appropriate level. It was obvious that Grgi, as the single guy, is considered a candidate... But nothing came of it. We ate, thanked, left. The nasal girl got married soon thereafter, at the next visit we even saw the wedding pictures and had some cake.
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* glodur is abbreviated from glavni i odgovorni urednik - the main and responsible editor; the point here is that word glodar means rodent
** forelast is straight translation from any slavic language... really, english, you have words for dozen kinds of glasses, hats, moods, colors etc - how can you not have this? Also overmorrow and overyester - the day after tomorrow / before yesterday (prekosutra, prekjuče), is it so hard to do? And then we also have naksutra/nakjuče, meaning three days ahead/before.
11-VI-2021 - 18-V-2026