The furniture for the new offices was scheduled to arrive around 14:00. So it turned out that I was the only one going home that way (as in "everybody else found a reason to be somewhere else"), and that I had to meet a guy about software for school class scheduling. So I arranged to meet him there at the same time, and reluctantly volunteered him to help me carry all those wheely chairs and desks downstairs. The heat was awful, but at least we could sit comfortably in the cool shade inside, when we were done. I would have gladly accepted a drink, but there was none.
Next week it was Grgi and me who held the fort, because everybody else was on vacation. We had four (or five by then) yugos to pick from. The trouble was that gasoline was hard to find.
Sale had the idea to save on gasoline - five cars, even though only yugos, did consume - by having twenty phone lines (hoping to get at least six, that would help a lot), from Vanji's old connection, some Arsenić, an engineer and probably the boss of telephony in the municipality. The memorable answer was „Twenty lines? Are you nuts? If you asked me whether it was raining in Zrenjanin now, I wouldn't dare look through the window, I'd have to call Belgrade to ask whether it was raining in Zrenjanin... and you think I can give you twenty lines“. So two lines it was, don't even remember if we ever got a third. Even so, remoting to customers helped a lot. The cost of phones was regularly equal to that of the gasoline.
As per my entry on sezam on 16th, "we failed when we tried to get a brewery as a customer, because we asked for money for software and hardware. The competition won by accepting payment of five tons of beer. Now that will be an app... specially if they got an advance.
On 23rd:
In a largish company here the bigwigs are sitting and discussing their balance sheet. After some half an hour, someone asks whether this is all in new or old dinars. Then it took them another half an hour to establish that.
On 28th:
"Can someone explain what's going on with cigarettes? The tobacco tax is the sweetest dish for any state, and in this state, which has finally invented financial police (again), nobody even thinks of raiding the tobacco mafia. When the Russians, Romanians and the Poles were reigning over the flea markets here, the cops would chase them away at least once in ten days. These now sell on the sidewalks, green markets, anywhere, and not the smuggled macedonian cigarettes anymore, it's those from Niš, which they buy in the kiosk as soon as they arrive.
I went nuts first when I saw that private kiosks sell only two or three packs (what kind of private merchants are they when they have such a "everything rationed" socrealistic attitude), but then I understood that they are trying to protect their regular customers.
W. Post says that black market mafias are mostly composed of "meritory criminals - war veterans" which is why they're Sloba's pets (or else they'd turn against him :>). Anyone with a better explanation?
p.s. I managed on my own. After fifteen years of emitting positive vibrations to the north end of town, I succeeded, offline, to convince the local tobacco industry to start selling rolling tobacco. Not bad. Anyone with a good connection? The only (AFAIK) factory of cigarette paper we had remains in Rijeka ;(."