Going home over Tompa/Kelebija again, seems to be we liked it on our way out. I kind of remember it was still snow outside. I was sort of promising myself a two week vacation from Hungary, and then come back for a couple of more tours to wrap things up, and then we'll reorganize and see how to proceed.
That night I kind of think we were without power and sat by the candlelight. Which may have been some other time, when I tried to read Ursula le Guin's "Sötetség balkeze" (left hand of darkness) in hungarian, which is tied to candlelight in my mind. Perhaps that we talked this long, in the same setting. The little table by the left window to the terrace. Very quickly it boiled down to the sole question of "if you go there again, can you see that it will get better". For the life of me, I couldn't say yes. It kept getting worse, and the attitude of management wouldn't get any better - hey, they just got away with two months of extra effort with paying the inflation eaten rate of eighteen months ago. They'd be, i.e. Mihály would be, emboldened with this bright result. Time to show some teeth and a middle finger.
So that was the last of it, and the end of my career with Szoftex. The guys brought my last salary, for those eight days, in forints, when they got it. There were two new kids in the programozó section of it, they can take over. And Joška will keep going anyway.
I was now just self-employed, i.e. only a worker and co-owner in Avai, be how it may.
And, well, a bit of epilogue: Joška kept going for two or three more rounds, and then he too had enough. Of course, the cost of transportation was now divided by two, not three. We hired him in Avai then.
Vanji kept going until june or so, to do manage, plan, draw schemes and whatnot, perhaps even manage the software team and learn that capitalism. He wanted to stay unemployed at home for as long as possible, to enlarge the bill he will once force, in court, Sale and DBA to pay. He won the process in the end and was paid, at a time when DBA was already peeing thin, and they never recovered from this blow. Too bad, but that's how the cards fell.