Back to work. The customer for today was the lingerie factory, in the same place where my grandmother used to work, when it was a net factory. Didn't have much to do; heard that one of the girls was leaving for the US... her husband got a job.
On my way out I had to visit the other branch of theirs, which was in the next street. They had a passage through connected yards and took me that way; I was pushing my bicycle. At halfway, I got a nasty spasm and vomited all of my breakfast and coffees, getting almost choked by my gag reflex. Obviously, I survived, but it was nasty.
Usually this kind of thing happens to anyone going seaside - different water, different food, it just takes one day of rather upset stomach to get used to it. Couple of guys from the office, and at least one of their kids, got that on 2nd or 3rd day there. My girls had no problem, nor did I... except that this hit me when accomodating to home again.
Just possible that I was also a bit upset that the rumors haven't abated. On the contrary.
One of these days I arranged for Joška to present his dental app, to offer to DBA to buy, convert from Clipper into fox, and then sell. We didn't have too many medical customers, perhaps none at all, so this could be the first bite into that market. I knew Joška from sezam but also from some obscure BBSes, something local with a japanese name, Orada, Neruda, Fukuda or some such (ah yes - Takeda!), where we talked (with others, of course) about many things, and he was mostly very open about his problems. He's not tall at all, and has problems even finding shoes ("when I finally find some, they have a mickey mouse printed on them"), not to mention girls. For the latter, he once confided to one, on a party, of what a problem he has with being near invisible, and kept on and on until he realized she was just waiting for him to finish the speech. "I was so carried away with my voice I almost forgot to fuck".
So we met, up on the square, in front of sdk. We were both completely different from how we should look in real life, based on the image composed while reading each other online. That lasted about ten seconds, then it was obvious that this was the only possible way we could look, everything else would be wrong. I've had such experience already, with some guy from sezam (who wrote one of the keyboard drivers for our keyboard layout, which wasn't anywhere near standardized yet, unless it was following the typewriter layout, but then the PC has more keys, so the devil was in the details), where he described me as "I expected an urban yuppie, and I met a wild hippie". It went similarly with Škrba, whom I first met in winter 91/92.
Apart from his height, somewhere up to my chin, he looked the exact wild hairy guy, beard and long hair, tied off in a ponytail. And his voice was unexpectedly low pitched, with a weird hint of accent I wouldn't have expected from his writing (yeah, there's that effect too). Just another virtual person come to life.
The reception in DBA was cold. Not outright unwelcome, just something like "here comes another guy with a miracle app we'll sell and all get rich, just looking for an opening to get a job, while we're barely covering our asses". So he got no praise, not even much of a tap on the shoulder, and the whole app was forgotten, until perhaps some occasion a couple of months later when Sale mentioned "we don't need guys like that, nor any dental artists", which was a reference to a display on the main form, where all the teeth were shown.
On 23rd, wrote this on sezam
A friend of mine got, from Holland, a complete portable macintosh with lit lcd vga screen, trackball, some software (corel, WP, excel and few other gadgets :). Processor is 68020, disk 40... price? I sat on my ass - below 2000 morons. Machine is to weep, just short of a bag and pocket modem, the guy promised to bring next time.
Around this time we went into that corner of Srem again. We visited them seldom, because it's a bit far, and we gave them the usual spiel „sure can come if you find where we can buy gasoline to drive home“. This time we didn't go via Ilok, because we had no reason to swing by Novi, and also Rade and I guess Števa too wanted to buy some wine, this is the wine half of Srem. We got the job done, didn't need a reason to se Čamovi again, and our liaison guy took us to a nearby village to get the gasoline, as much as we can fit in the tank. The barrels were in some low space, beneath a kotarka, probably was a pigpen once, and those may get even lower, this was just a pedalj short of two meters. The guy told us, on the way there, how in these villages pretty much every household has it own unproforac [member of UnProForces], and they make oodles of money trading fuel and alcohol.
It being dusk, that hole was almost in the dark, so we somehow managed to open the barrel, syphon the fuel into the canister, fill the tank, pay, get in the yugo... and it started spewing thick black smoke. We poured diesel. Of course we knew how to syphon it out, and even lifted the left side of it to get the last of it out. Poured proper gasoline, but of course what got into the fuel line was still there, thin enough to burn on sparks. By the time we passed half of the village, the heads stopped turning as we passed.
9-XII-2013 - 19-X-2025