Got off the train in Zagreb Glavni Kolodvor before 7. Studied the tram map a bit, and went to eat something first. Got some kind of a sandwich in a bun at a milk restaurant with a view of the HNK. The girl at the counter put it in a mirko, exactly the same model as we had, and held it too long. I tried to tell her to cut it short, but she wouldn't listen. It came out quite hot, took me a while to eat it.
Then found my tram frrom Trg Republike to somewhere in the south of the city to pass the tests. Found the building, the location within it, the proper desk to report to, dispensed with all the formalities (there weren't many) and then went to passing the tests. Which I did.
I felt like cheating on the general IQ test, because about a fifth of the questions were thinly veiled mathematical problems - geometry transformations, or simple equations with graphics instead of letters - which I easily recognized as such and solved. There was a nice logical twist, it asked for a sentence which is opposite to "today is a nice sunny day". All those who mentioned night and bad weather have failed. The exact opposite is "today is not a nice sunny day". But then, these tests are a perfect measure of one's ability to pass these tests. For the personal inventory, I imagined a person they would like to have on their TV quiz, and then let that person supply the answers.
The main part was the final interview - you enter a room, classroom sized, with all the important staff (including the big boss Lazo Goluža) sitting there and silently staring at you. Complete silence. Ah, this is supposed to be a scene test? I'll give you one... whoever taught in III8 can't have survived and kept the stage fright. I greeted them and asked some innocent question, like "so what are we supposed to do now?".
And so I enrolled into kviskoteka.
After the test, when the formalities were over and the diurnals paid out, I went to visit my pal from vojska, Morkec. Had a lunch, a few drinks, and in the evening a party with his friends. We got quite drunk, but they still managed to get me on the train on time. I remember sobering up by talking with the conductor in the corridor. Getting drunk on wine is all fucked up, it's retarded, gets you much later.
Nice story I heard from him - his own brother was drafted into the very same platoon. Morkec tried to describe the face of Elvir when he realized that he's getting the same trouble all over again :). Worse, this guy knows everything in advance.
This was the first year of daylight savings in SFRY, and the night 29/30 was when at 3:00 it was 2:00 again. I wondered what the trains do during that hour. Well, they sit in the stations and wait. Luckily, I slept through that, so when the train moved at 3:00, I discovered that it was just sitting in some station for the whole hour.