While working at school, we got our salaries via savings accounts. You'd have a savings booklet, which held all the transactions and current total. That was introduced around 1977 or so, there were no cash payments, all the salaries had to go through the banks, allegedly to boost the ability of the banks to finance the economy. Ahem.
I'd go to Ljubljanska banka, where schools had their accounts. Once or twice a month I'd just visit there and raised what cash I needed. There was a cashier guy who achieved perfect elegance of movement. You would just watch him count the cash, it was a balet of hands.
Well the system was that the whole payroll went through the same bank, nobody wanted to bother to make multiple lists, one for each bank. So when I moved to stour, I had to open a new account, in Banatska, in vodotoranj. And I got a checkbook. Over time I noticed that the checks pass slowly, I'd pass a check on friday and it would be cashed next thursday. Now since I was already coding the interest calculus, I took to tracking the transactions and watching how it went, trying to calculate the interest in advance, just to see how my method compares with theirs. I specially tried to pay as many things as possible by check while on vacation, because the speed of cashing fell exponentially with distance.
And now I got the annual interest sheet from the bank. And it doesn't add up. The order of transactions, the running total, in many places it's less than what it was on monthly statements. I just sat and compared, item by item... and look at that, the dates have shifted. The check for gasoline, which I wrote somewhere in Lika on 20th of august, had cashed in mid september, now it turns out it cashed on 20th of august. They replaced the cashing date with the nominal date throughout, retroactively. So they increased their total - for the INA surely didn't get the cash before mid september, while it now seems I lost it on 20th... so where was it meanwhile? On my bank's account. Ah so, just so that we know.
The term "bankster" became popular only in 2008, when it was imported from capitalism. But it could have been even then.
One day some guy comes to our programmers' room, says „I have come from the hospital“. I ask „so, feel better now?“. He stares blank, doesn't get the joke... who knows what he expected, perhaps coming among programmers for the first time in his life. Of course, a driver, and hospital director's driver, no less, and of course he came for me, to take me there to fix something. Okaaay... all in a day's work.
And I got there and fixed what was there to be fixed. And somehow managed to finish it just when their work hours ended (which was good, so I wouldn't have to come again to finish that). Yeah, great, and how do I get back downtown, my bicycle is waiting at erc's door. How easily they find transportation when they need me, and when they need to drive me back, they're nowhere.
And transportation was found, some van was heading to town. That is, the smallest vehicle which still counted as a van, on fića's chassis, with an extra row of seats in the front, above the axle, so it would seat six instead of four. But that's in the passenger version, this one had no windows in the back. I got a sack of potatoes to sit on. Give what you may, still better than walking.