The juicemaker which was mentioned on 20-X-1995. was a specially murky guy, and now he came to get something done. With his wife. He brought his computer, to save me from driving 40km to him, and probably had something else to do downtown. And I guess he paid some extra, perhaps 80 marks, and left a five liter „apple juice“ canister (each word merits its own quotation marks), chemistry's best, we tried it a couple of times and nobody liked it, nobody wanted it, we just threw it away altogether, not even trying to reuse the vessel.
The situation was quite uneasy, despite all the pretense, simply because I don't like to have private contact with customers, specially not them visiting me at home, may it be a hundred times a tezga - it's always done on their location, where they have the documentation and accountant and everything, while I don't need them in my home at all. But the guy insisted, even when I told him the cost, so I got it done and out of the way. The wives, again, didn't find any common language, so we all just waited for it to be done.
And it got done and we never saw him again. I wish I knew why he insisted on it being me, Brlja could have done that just as well.
(except it wasn't today, but rather in the summer or early fall, but I have none of then files; what I do have is of this date, but looking at the generated masks, I see that those from fall 1995 have * GenerAll C:\FPD26\PRC\OPISFMM4.PRG v.4.10 FoxPro 2.6 (X), and these now have * GenerAll C:\COMP\FOXPRO\PRC\OPISFMM4.PRG v.4.10f FoxPro 2.6 (X)... and I never, really never had a directory named so. The former is mine, this is his, or at least done on his machine - it did happen that we worked at his place a couple of times.)
(the only reason why I had stuff on my see disk is that it wasn't my disk, I got it formatted so from the office (Szoftex or Avai?... well, irrelevant); if it was mine, none of my stuff would be on the see partition, it would all go elsewhere)
And another tezga, guess next winter, was in Idvor, some small wholesale firm which worked out of an ordinary peasant's house - some space converted into warehousing, some added on, the yard to be paved next so the trucks stop making mud, the all-busy pattern. The owner was a young man, the bride young and sound, rocking one still carrying another, shining with pregnancy, obviously a happy couple and they got it going well. The apps were standard wholesale - stock tracking and main ledger, so they passed us to their accountant. With him we sat in the house maybe a couple of hours on day one, and the other two or three times at his place, further down the street, in peace and quiet, because in the firm it was very busy, every few minutes someone would get in to say something - workers, drivers, family.
The accountant was an interesting character, a refugee from Bosnia, quiet, peaceful and moderately verbose, with the exact bosnian sense of humor, where you don't roll on the floor laughing, but chuckle every couple of minutes over some piece of wit. And this apartment where he moved the computer is a slightly remodeled summer kitchen in... no less than the yard of the birth house of Mihajlo Pupin (qv, a scientist who made long distance calls viable). The house itself is, they say, a museum, still didn't fall but I'd rather not get in to check whether it would. And it's not different from thousands of such simple peasants' houses.
This gig ended in two-three swings. I remember no names - not the company, not the accountant, not the family.
4-I-2024 - 8-I-2026