A private company in a village just south of town, among five biggest Avai's customers. Don't know how did they start, probably as just truckers with a few vehicles, but at the time we got to them, they had a dozen large trucks zipping all over Europe, a wheat silo... and then acquired three more, at least one of which they built.
Doing the silo app was fun, as the machines were surrounded by organic dust, and endangered by mice (who love warm places with neat thin cables to chew). We also had to develop an interface with the truck weighing scale, with all the logic of weighing it full then empty (or vice versa).
In the silos they had some solid hardware, mostly pentiums, all spanking new, and a same old Epson el ex 400 printer. And it didn't matter that the weigh station cottages were also brand new, the mice found a way to get in and nest, so one of the printers ended up on Branko's workbench. The diagnose was that mice peed on the motherboard and the urine etched the printed circuits. Throw away, buy a new one.
Their boss's tales were interesting (or was he the owner, fuck me if I know) were interesting. He said he got saddled with a bunch of relatives from Bosnia when the war there began in 1992. „Eh, refugees devourers*... sit there all day, chugging beer and munching potato chips, staring at the teevee and not moving a dick... they wasted the third remote already. Is it possible that we were like that when we came here? Good thing that these Lalas tolerated us.“
There was a funny event at their office, actually a story I overheard as it was occurring, when some of the girls was trying to send a fax, and not having a separate line for it, had to talk with the other side between attempts, of which there were at least three and not one success. „And then she asked me whether I put paper properly... well that's an outrage, she wants me tu put paper in so she won't have to spend hers!“.
I posted the story on sezam, and it made its way into PC Press magazine.
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* it rhymes: „izbjeglice izjelice“
20-XI-2019 - 17-IV-2024