10-XII-1980.

We started our household by bying a microwave. It was one of the first of the kind - the seller didn't even know what it was exactly, not to mention how it works or how to operate it. The manufacturer was EI Niš, but inside, as we later discovered, was Toshiba tough steel magnetron. The box was maybe made in Niš. The original english (or probabry engrish) manual was not supplied, and the mimeographed translation was among the worst and most confused texts I ever saw.

We judged that it would consume about 15% of electricity that the classic hotplate does, and wanted to do things right from the start. If we needed stuff to go on a frying pan, we still had our student time rešos.

It was bulky, heavy - sized as a 51cm TV set - and it worked flawlessly for years. We once overloaded it while trying to make čvarci in it, but it only blew its internal fuse - it was still under warranty, so the guy from EI's repair shop (called servis, i.e. service) fixed that for free. Years later, the greasy condensate in the plastic roof caught fire; we removed it and operated without it. It was only covering the field mixing rod on the chamber's ceiling (yes, it was an old model without the rotating plate). In the nineties, the bearing in the fan started making a lot of noise, and as it was operating on 125V inside, we couldn't find a replacement. It still worked until 1999. We gave it to some guy to repair and sell in 2005.

First we started experimenting with various vessels - ceramic, plastic etc. We tried to cook a whole potato, and it stayed the same on the outside while being thoroughly charred inside. The stink was unbearable.

We tried frying some piece of meat in it, on a plastic platter. The grease melted fine, and was so hot that it melted a corner of the platter. The skin didn't change the color much, and in some places it was crispy and dry, while in others it wasn't cooked much. The mixing rod isn't perfect, you need to move the item at times.

It was funny a few months later, when some of her relatives visited, and we had to explain the technical side of it... funny reversal, for once the Yugos explain technology to Germans :).

We made coffee in it. Actually, we kept making coffee in it for years, and still do, 40 years later.

In "Lun, kralj ponoći" (mentioned 24-VII-1972. and 13-VII-1976.) it was frequently mentioning microtrasmiters (mikropredajnik), and just equally often it would have a typo, would begin with mirko-, because Mirko is a frequent male name here. So this machine, and its descendants, were called mirko henceforth. I think this is where the family tradition, that machines should have nicknames, started.

Đuđa's daughter was still convinced it was a TV. Funny looking one, with black wide screen in a shiny steel frame, but a TV. She probably didn't get any of our "it's an oven" story.

There was a neat episode at work - one of the construction engineers who taught the technology curriculum for those trades, related a story from a couple of years ago, while we walked across the pedestrian bridge to our evening buses (so it must have been one of my long mondays). He worked in the road maintenance enterprise, and as the winter was approaching, they were getting ready to buy rock salt as usual. However, someone from komitet had other ideas and ordered them to divert the money to who knows which worthy cause - some investment which needed to be completed to some politician's glory, or even some sport club, who knows. So they bought very little salt and all the money was gone, and they had to keep mum about it. Then when the big snow fell, they had none and just plowed it off as much as they could. The reporters got wind of this and a guy from Politika Ekspres asked him what happened. "So what could I say - that we were told what to do with the money? That I couldn't say, so instead I said we were surprised by the snow. Of course, the headline said 'surprised by snow in february'... well, fuck it, at least I made headlines".

Not just headlines, man. The sentence became a part of the folklore. Of the language itself.

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Mentions: 24-VII-1972., 13-VII-1976., čvarci, Đurđa Rođanović (Đuđa), komitet, mirko, rešo, yugo, in serbian

16-VI-2012 - 16-I-2026