Some time in the afternoon I met with Radoje at stambena. He had the key, and we sat for an hour or two, with me at the keyboard of the Partner. He taught me the basics of CP/M and specifics of COBOL on it (yep, the m$ Cobol). Started out with retyping a simple data entry routine for one of the few lookup tables, from a listing they wrote in stour.
This is the day I started coding for money. IOW, turned pro.
In the following months I started doing a lot of it on my own. Even printed a hex dump of an index file, to understand how indexing works. Soon I got to know the operators, staff, and became a member of the stambena myself. Had to do some paperwork for that, but then it saved me some money for the house, the purchases then being tax free (at least retail tax; the wholesale tax still applied), and a lot of time I'd spend looking for some equipment and specially scaffolds and the big saw to cut blocks.
For this tezga we also had Lidija on the team, but she didn't sit by the keyboard much, her job was more the analysis and design.
I don't quite remember how I met Radoje in the first place - whether accidentally downtown, or we agreed to meet, or both, in that order. He said that, had we met when the time was right, I could have been a programmer at least four years ago. He was the chief of erc in the carpet facory, i.e. textile kombinat, and there he hired Staša*. Who then forgot to tell him that he hadn't served the vojska yet, and as he's a year younger, I could have just jumped in instead of him, and by the time we served, there'd be space for both of us. But we didn't meet then. Well, this time he decided he needed me, but had a problem how to shove me in, because the thing about employment in nonproducing branches was still enforced, so only when expanding etc... after six years it didn't get any better. But it would be easier now, would take only an adjustment in the systematization of workplaces (or were they already called „jobs and work tasks“), for which he'd to cook the general director a bit, because the erc is in the work community of common services, i.e. doesn't belong to any single oour.
Some time this year, well I don't know where to put this story because I only remember the place and roughly the girls' age, we had pancakes, of course with pekmez, granma's. As for many other practical matters, like my method of opening yogurt, for pancakes I also invented a trick how to eat them without the pekmez oozing out the other end. I'd simply fold them and thus put both ends in my mouth. This may be a problem if it was rolled too tight, it may tear on the outer side of the fold, but I rolled them loosely enough to have this problem very rarely.
A different problem arose - Go and Nina began to emulate me. Verging on the danger of suffocation. She somehow managed to convince them not to try that anymore, it's just that, she emphasised, „dad has big mouth“.
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* things didn't happen in that order, though. Staša told me on 05-X-2023. that he got hired there after receiving a stipend from the factory, so „I came and said I've graduated now, reporting, and the guy said come to work on monday“. Radoje started working there two days later.