These days the money was replaced (again?). Ththis was because SFRY became FRY, they removed one zero just to make the cash remaining in the four former members of the federation worthless. Now this came a bit late, they had a couple of months to do that (or, rather, a whole year), and created as much chaos as it helped. The people were used to the look of banknotes, and now these have shifted - the face on 500 was now on 50 etc, but it was the same banknote, because all the prices also lost one digit... that was confusing to too many people.
Had to write a denom.prg to do denomination all over the app. Don't quite remember how it worked; I guess it went for all the places in prgs where picture clauses were used, or some other text parsing. Later it just went and gathered all the picture strings and replaced them with global variables, so when a new format for unit price, value and total (each longer than the previous) was set, it would apply to the whole app. The size of the fields was maxed at 19,0, eventually.
Sale wrote a different routine, demon.prg (demonization :)), which was app specific - it would add stuff to the given cutoff date, then subtract the total (on item, customer, account level, I guess) and then add the denominated value. I somehow remember mine was more general and solved the roundoff errors more elegantly.
Around this month the big dance with some bank in Plandište began. We already had customers in the area, and the place was brimming with activity these years - there was the big textile printing plant, some production of small plastic pieces, bunch of agriculture production - which all merited having a local bank, to make the money stay and circulate in the place. During one of visits I saw Đinćđić come out of a big black car with few other guys. Well if that team visits, the place must be of some importance.
For this bank I wrote the calculus interest and something for the front clerks. And there they get the bright idea to introduce a printer for savings booklets. It is a matrix printer but not with perforated paper going through, it drags the booklet in and prints on the first blank row, exactly where it should. Such printer was hard to find, but a middlemen found himself. That is, we sold the gadget, acquired it through him, this Miroslav something guy. He was near the entrance into the village from our side, looked almost intellectual with those spectacles, wore himself so, real young gentleman of the time. I took him to Novi Beograd once because... this printer was never sold separately, it came with the whole system which operated on Unix, and now that we procured it through his channels, it lacked manuals. What manual there was didn't help at all - it was a bad translation, printed on mimeograph, with a bunch of wrong words, typos and whatnot, mostly referring to the banking app with which it came, very little of it apart from the app. Even so I managed to drag out the important command sequences from it, but not the key one - how to get it started, to accept further commands. So he made a deal with the supplier that they'll pack the drivers on a floppy, for 1500 DEM. We were seriously in the red with this, but by now it was a matter of honour, can we deliver or not. And from that floppy I dragged out some small file, read it as hex and found the crucial 15 bytes of the initializer sequence. Put that ahead of my output and suddenly it worked, when it was already november. Hundred DEM per byte, not too shabby.
So once, about this month, when this story was just beginning to roll, Blaža and I went to pick him up. He was supposed to be at home, and then we'd go somewhere. Blaža was driving and I guess had a cigarette lit at the moment, so it fell to me to walk over and knock on the window. Village houses generally don't have bells, and nobody would hear knocking on the gate, so window. And it opened and there's this girl in transparent yellow sleeping gown, tits just right, rich but not exaggerated, just the kind I like... His sister. Said he wasn't at home, and invited me to sit on the veranda, glassed in but in shade, while she hunts him on the phone. So we sat there, and the rest of her was just as good, a real candy, why do such things some up at work... And she started dialing, one cigarette, another one... I said my colleague is in the car, must have gotten hot by now. So I took him in, needed a witness. Later we both sighed. Said why did you invite me, you should have helped her, see how heavy they are, should have held them for her, alleviate the burden. Um, yes, I wouldn't have believed myself.
And I guess we dug him out somehow, after half an hour's ogling. Never saw her again, and next year we heard she got married.
30-VIII-2011 - 19-X-2025