The date is arbitrary. I remember it was springtime and bright cloudy, so it could have been any time between april and now. The engine in DBA's first yugo was allegedly worn out. True, it clocked at least 200.000 km so far, in just three years, which is astonishing for a Zastava. Usually you had to do a general* before half that.
I think I drove that to the brother of Brata, somewhere in my wider neighborhood, as he'll arrange for the engine to be replaced. Now he wasn't any kind of shop, not that I knew. Brata and Sale were in the latter's Corolla, so we left the yugo there and went on whichever business we had.
The old engine sounded right to me. You'd hear the valves clicking here and there, when accelerating more heavily, but it wasn't getting worse - it was just the same as when it was new. Sounded like a bit of murky business, but okay, perhaps I'm not the engine tuner with perfect hearing. The engine was, indeed, replaced within a few days and the car kept on, making more thousands of kilometers. The story goes that a yugo is a lottery, you may get all kinds of trouble or you may get one that could well outlive you, and we got lucky.
Not so lucky the next time with this guy. After we sold all 123 machines and 40 UPSes from the last batch, it was time to procure the next one. This time we didn't pretend to be exporting anything, it was his part of the deal. He got some 22 or 25000$ from DBA, to pass to Acrotech on Taiwan. Which never happened. The money was just gone. He did report some procedural trouble, how he kept trying to pass the money to his company in Greece, how it got into some administrative snafu... Amazingly, not only Brata came out it scat free, Sale also wasn't called on this. Except a couple of times, perhaps. We were still a society owned, selfmanaged enterprise, and actually having so much currency in cash was illegal at least, that was money off the books. Or maybe it was on the books, which would make it even more interesting... Well, nobody I spoke with knew this in any detail, and now, 30 years later, who knows if anyone would remember.
But the money was still gone.
On twentyisxth I wrote a script which would run through any text file (and I see that what I ran it on were mostly texts from sezam) and replace every „dj“ with a proper đ (then a |, though, juski was in use).
My folks stopped bying „Politika“, after fourtysome years. Under pressure. The reason was not that it turned into a totally disgusting slime, that the popaganda became evil and violent (communists, all is forgiven), it's that they are running low on cash. Dad will resume buying it a few years later.
From this period I remember that the USP (not UPS!) was our customer. Luckily, nothing specific to them, because c'mon, they are an association of standalone entrepreneurs (samostalnih privatnika), among us called weakminded privatniks (slaboumnih privatnika), which wouldn't be much as an app, it'd be membership fees and few more tidbits. Nope, they had just the main ledger and assets. The director of the association was Čuta, who seems to have followed me like a bad penny. Not director of stambena anymore, here now. We'd greet like old war friends, and then he'd spew some bullshit and get lost stage left. Someone would come looking for him, and the girls would say he was in the library. What would he be doing there during working hours? Eh, „we say so if anyone asks for him... if it's anyone close enough, we say he's in the backyard“. Ah, yeah, we know what's in the backyard.
The USP was a descendant of the once association of artisans, which most likely built the house, or at least owned it, some hundred years ago. The association had, in each of its transitory states, a tavern in its backyard, always the same one: Zanatlija (literally: artisan). And really, it's not befitting to say „director went into tavern“, not proper, not nice, library sounds much better.
They also bought a DL3400, as needed, one needs to print wide financial reports. But here it found another purpose, which I wouldn't have known had it not become necessary for me to help with - Žarko Krčmar, once the zvukovnjak (zvuk=sound, that's what we called sound engineer then) in the old Dom, had a coffee roasting shop, and couldn't find a printery which would do the labels, now that he found a way to package and sell it. The roast shops sprouted everywhere, seems they were quite profitable, that's where small privatniks managed quite well. So there, within half an hour I put together a script which would print a score of them labels, repeat until enough.
Apart from two shoddy operator girls (one Drena, from whose hand I wouldn't take even a walnut, and another one so nondescript I don't remember her at all), there was one Klara, a runaway from Slavonski Brod (a city on the left bank of Sava in Croatia, there's a Bosanski Brod on the bosnian bank too). She and [her!] husband worked in a state factory, not really selfmanagerial but rather for vojska, guess they made tanks or some such devices, and having blood cells of wrong color, they gave fire to their heels and ran to Serbia when it became dangerous. She was cuteish, curly blonde with somewhat sensual voice, well dressed and made up, had style. I quickly began avoiding her, exactly for being such. She kept impressing a feeling that she's slightly seductive, as if there's already a hint of relationship between her and you, which ended up each time with you doing her some favor and getting nothing for it. I recognized a few psychological tricks she used, and realized the best strategy would be to drive far around her. Which worked, what apps they had wasn't demanding, both were old and battle tested, so I soon quit visiting them.
She recounted, later, some of her war stories. Of the firsthand ones, from Brod, I remember nothing, but from across Sava, from Bosnia, I vividly remember how it would occur that two villages, a serbian and muslim, made a deal on the outset that they'll put up a pretend frontline, where will they target their weapons, and then at the set time of day, usually efore dusk, they'd exchange fire, spend the allotted amount of ammunition, write reports to their supperiors, and then sit together over a proper house roast and rakija to celebrate surviving yet another day of war. This conspiracy, however, wouldn't fail to reach wrong ears, and the headquarters on both sides were quite mad at the very idea that a pair of opposing villages will not war. Then they'd send a hit squad each, which would take the empty trenches, and fire a dozen grenades at the opposite village, making sure they'd kill some, and vanish before anyone had time to suspect third party interference. The villages would now start fighting for real, and by the time the news of upstairs meddling reached them, they were at war. The trick had to be applied in several places. The war engineering.
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* „generalna opravka“ - general repair, proper english would be refurbishing
28-I-2023 - 19-VIII-2026