31-VIII-2001.

Email from Vanji... lots of gossip from home - how the business is conducted, how Mika Fišer is now a figure of nice political stature (because his father is among the local founders of DS and is too old to be awarded any position), how he uses that to unite his own little ISP company with the city hall's IT department, making money left and right, spending a fortune (of public money) on just one evening with his reporters in kaštel (as he's now the director of the local newspaper), how economy is mostly off the record, gray and untaxed. Also, Radoje is now a full time politician in some party which is a partner in DOS, which is like a bombed zoo, the cages are dismantled and the beasts roam free, and they are the government now. As such, he's the director of the city urban development enterprise, which is where you get all those building permits.

Email from Magi, with a picture of her somewhere in south of France, where she stayed for about a month. Looking young and very sexy, divorce seems to suit her. Said she stayed at a friend's (male, gender implied). Well, good luck.

The day the Zero went officially bust. Not that we didn't know it in advance - I have emailed all my private files, namely the apps from home, the archive, to my Yahoo address, yesterday.

The place was pretty much a training center - I was a senior there after just six months, and my definition of senior is „I came here before more than half of the people“. Of the gang I remember from two years ago, still present were the managing trio (Greg, Ford, Pete), Janna, Larry and Felix, Ted, Ted (yup, had two guys with the same name, and at least three Mikes, and who knows how many more the CIA had planted, even the firewalls have ears) and the Marvinskis guy. And, ah yeah, D.F., the CFO.

The rest are either absent on the shots, or came later. Of course, I took more shots of the better looking girls - another jewish girl with wide front, the thin D.K. whose husband was a cabbie (that's all I know) and the redhead by conviction who was the new DBA last few months, and who redid the whole database from scratch, forget the Borg engine, and was my kind of programmer, we communicated really well. Wish she was there from the beginning, no matter that her husband was there too - don't remember him at all, and if he's on the pictures, I didn't recognize him.

Sam and Andy may have still been there, don't remember. They were regulars at our smoke breaks, for educational purposes, grabbing tricks from us yugos, even though they didn't smoke.

The last CEO, some jewish guy who was hired for the last... six months?... made a speech of how it all went, how they tried to persuade at least some of the investors, but in the end it went to nothing and the remainder of assets is now taken over by Wachovia bank.

The speech included this

- ...and nobody will be paid for august.

- so that was your plan from day one, eh?

- didn't include me not being paid!

We actually didn't get paid health insurance for july either, and the july salary was already a quarter short.

They didn't send anyone to do the takeover, so in the following days the PCs and other stuff were sold for pittance - Ford's sons got PCs for 100$ each. I wish I took a chair, but was actually rather busy taking dozens of shots of the aftermath. Don't know what happened with the serious machines, like the server stack in Ted's shed, where I think there were four or six serious boxes.

The „don't sit on the shelf“ sign was there since perhaps second month after the move, because these partitions aren't strong at all, they're flimsy sheet metal profile frames filled with the stuff for lowered ceilings (and the ceilings were indeed lowered, that's where the AC tunnels went, and where Ted ran all the network cables across the whole floor). Today, I've seen guys sitting on it - one of them project manager for the thin Hossy (not the Marvinskis guy, he was, I think, the produc* manager), the other one Ford's younger son.

Everybody came with cardboard boxes and packed their personal effects. I didn't have much - my Jensen headset, which didn't cost much except in time wasted finding it. Because I needed something with a long enough cable, the standard being four feet. This was seven or eight. The problem was that about 90% of the headsets, and I checked maybe forty until I found this one, don't say the length on the packaging. These were the years when the technical specs gradually vanished from the boxes, as the marketing guys decided the buyers were too stupid to read them. And it's a liability, increases chances of discrepancy between print and contents.

The whole atmosphere was of moderate joy and little concern. September in Virginia is still very much summer, so anyone would take some time to cool off their feet (serbian: cool off their balls), nobody was too worried, as the dot com boom has already burst, deflated and now the next cycle is gaining momentum. Speaking of which, our downstairs neighbor, who lost his new Golf car in a 17-car chain crash on the highway last winter, black ice it was, vanished to who knows where, when ValueAmerica, the precursor of Amazon, went bust. Now there's a young couple in that apartment, pure aborigines, one can tell, seeing them walk outside in their socks.

This office, last door to the right, had this poster of Bob Marley, done in a couple of thousand of smaller photos, each photo playing a role of perhaps four pixels. That gimmick was quite popular those years.

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* Ford never pronounced that final t, and his second month of the year never had two rs, it was always febewary, period.

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Mentions: 03-IX-2001., Allan Robin (Ford), Felix Goncour, Greg Reubenthal, Hossy, Janna Robinsen, kaštel, Larry Artois, Margita Gunaroši (Magi), Pete Citroën, Radoje Maletin, Radovan Fišer (Mika Fišer), Ted Gulding, training center, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), yugo, Zero Distance (Zero), in serbian