Reporting to oldwave: „BTW, the epilogue of then buying the tiny boxes on the Fair: Go should haul the new Sony line, twice hundred hwatts, from Novi. The windows are anchored well, the house is solidly built, now only to avoid quarrel with sisters about the noise. Anyway, not one of them can sleep unless something is playing :)“
Go was doing her matricular paper. She picked art as subject, and surrealism as the topic. This meant hunting down the net for any available pictures from Dali, Magritte and a few others. We did find them, though not in any particularly large resolution.
She typed it in Word. Not that we had any other text processor at hand, the software was scarce, and anyway Avai was a m$ reseller at the time, going where Szoftex went before. On the other hand, even if we had any different software, I'd have to find a place to print this properly, and had to use a format that would be available there.
She did it right, the end result looked perfectly. And I found a place to print it - the city hall. While the SPS did buy off enough members of the local parliament and did run the important stuff, the IT department of it wasn't on their list, so its chief was no other than Mika Fišer. I brought the thing on a floppy, and he printed it on their best color spitter (that's what we called the inkjet printers), on best glossy paper, even engaged the in-house services to have it properly bound.
She passed (well, in may, as per the schedule) with flying colors, and the paper was such a success that we never got any of the printed copies back, the professor kept them.
The aforementioned Avai got screwed around this time and yet came off well at it. We had a big contract with a formerly state run system, now a joint-stock company, to network dozens of computers in their headquarters in some fifteen cities. Good dough, moderately complex job - Laza went through the list of places one by one, clocked hundreds of hours in the field, all went ship shape (and our CEO used this as grounds to claim that the hardware part of the company is so much more profitable than the software - yeah, right, but software cash drips every month, and things like this sometimes come, often they don't).
And then all of a sudden - bang, we lost the contract. Just so. It was awarded to some company connected with SPS, at the point where we already did half of the work, got 60% of the money and bought enough material for two more cities ahead. I couldn't even imagine that this was even possible, even less that there would be any profit in such a takeover... unless, of course, there was a possibility that they charged for the remainder much more than we would charge for the whole bundle, but as our liaison man there said, „ask me again about this in some twenty years, maybe then I'd be allowed to tell you what happened...“.
A showdown with MXM was announced. We had all kinds of apps there, from goods warehousing for wholesale and at times retail as well, to Acc157 and BarSys and trucking and whatnot. And then one of the brothers had a hardon to ditch us and switch to DBA... No matter, until that happens we worked as if we'll keep on for hundred years more. There, on 21st I wrote a packed date, shortened to four english characters, for invoice's serial number (with three characters it covers only 1990 to 2038, with four it's 1251 years).
I remember it was springtime, most probably this year, when we acquired an unusual customer. A frogger*, Petrući or Mareli or some such, married here, opened a plant to make bags, backpacks and such, all just plastic, something like the cloth for šuškavac or tarp just stronger. The plant was thirtysome women with sewing machines, in some building on a meadow in a village, don't even remember which one, somewhere aside from the little track. The building looked like a former management of some farm was in it, the farm being cunted away by decree, bought by someone who then didn't bother to take over the production, just rented out the land and office space. There weren't many apps to install, perhaps in the plans. For starters we installed the ledger alone, which was used by their accountant, accidentally the wife of the chief accountant in that big farm which was among prominent customers of DBA and then switched to us... So they got the nut brothers from MXM and we got this, the better deal.
Next visit was when he moved the production to Zrenjanin, guess the village arrangement was just temporary. Whether he moved the workers or found others, no idea. The space he found in the LC Crni Šor (black row), in the showroom space, the shows being off now. And not the whole hall, only the stage. Don't remember seeing a weirder setup. The office was a cubicle next to the stage, probably the once electrician's den, something two by three or smaller. Just enough for a computer, printer, binders and a chair. And that's where the story ended for me, there was not even any need for training, the lady used our apps until she retired, this was her tezga. There was no third visit, now whether there was no need for maintenance, or the frogger just gave up and closed shop, or he cunted away with wife, any scenario is possible. The curious thing is that nobody knew about him, name was not mentioned anywhere, a phantom.
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* Italians do eat frogs, and so do the Frenches. However, we call the former the froggers, they're closer to home.
5-V-2023 - 15-VII-2025