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.
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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 the we have naksutra/nakjuče, one more away.