The general mess in DBA is progressing. There was a vote of confidence recently, where Sale was so confident that he almost lost it 5:7 (actually worse, if we count the shares), but he looked around at the last moment and voted for himself. Had the vote not been open...
I was thoroughly pissed off with the situation. He already hired his own wife, and then thre other wives of supposedly loyal guys, and was actually surprised then I didn't consider myself bought. No, man, those 1300 marks are well below my real share in the worth of this enterprise and you know it. And I should be happy that I'm in the field at least two days a week, travelling my ass off, while your stupid wife warms her ass off in the office for the same salary as I?
So I composed an open letter, questioning the jurisdiction of the CEO to change the basic definition and mission statement of the company, from "best team in town" to "family enterprise". Something like that is a matter not even for the board, it's for the stockholders' assembly. I printed the letter (on office printers, of course, I owned about 6% of it) and distributed it to everybody, as food for thought for the next assembly.
By the time of that assembly, he had bought a couple of people - I guess Grgi got a loan to buy a new car, Brata, Fefi and Blaža got their wives hired and he had the majority. Next assembly was a very nervous affair, and it confirmed his reign. It was time to go, despite owning a share and having devoted more than five years to build this, it's just that the silent project Vanji and I had going on the side wasn't anywhere near fruition. There was one light moment at that meeting, though...
Brata: how can you, Vanji, go around and gossip behind my back of how obsolete I am?
Vanji: because I can't take you with me wherever I go, but I'll repeat it here so you get it first hand. How many times have you said you won't learn foxpro, foxplus is all you want to know?
What made the whole thing more interesting was that while Vanji and Rade were fired and not working here, not on the payroll, they were still shareholders and were fully entitled to be present on the assembly. As Rade said a few times "my bellyache passed", which is a straight reference to "I don't have stomach for this", expression used in cases when something really sleazy and nasty was done.
I think I had some machine at home, a lasting one this time, it didn't happen in quite a while that they come from the office to take it away because it was sold. So I had the copies of more or less all the apps we had, or at least those where I was involved (of which I counted once about a hundred, not different apps but app-customer pairs), so in the office I backed up the data from Kosta and took them home. The transaction record included the time of start and duration, at least for the time I entered them, which would be since november 1992, I extracted the times I worked after 15:00 (the official work hours began at 7). Totalled my overtime hours, and got a few hundred. Don't remember how many, between 200 and 600, fuckmeall [if I know]. I did a similar calculation for the guard duty hours in the army, got a similar number, easy to mix up.
The fuckup was that we didn't have overtime. This official work hours meant only that „anyone who'd come by outside this interval has a chance to kiss the door“, and how long will we actually work, nobody knew. Sale had the philosophy that „we all contribute as much as we can, and are paid as much as the firm can“. In practice, this meant a fixed salary, whereby all the programmers got more or less the same, just he and Vanji, as directors of sorts, were getting 30% and 20% more (or was it 20 and 15, fuckme if I remember). Which meant that those three missuses, despite being clueless on programming, ranked as programmers, and were paid the same as we who spent so many hours in the field. Which meant that three families (by now already four, as he also hired Fefi's wife, who was at least a system analyst in kombinat's erc so at least knew stuff) pulled eight salaries, while the six of us (oops... four - Rade and Gradek were gone) only one each.
I blew the cap already, just waited for a good time and exit.
During all this ruckus, he hired Borče as well, a few weeks ago. At least he did justify his salary, no complaints there, he got a tough problem to work on, and he solved it well.
24-V-2013 - 25-III-2026