klaanca

(Place, tavern, firm, Yugoslavia)

The big poultry slaughterhouse in Njujork, where most of us from DBA spent many hours installing, fixing and generally pushing our software forward. We had there all of general ledger, accounts *able, payroll, and (my kid) commodities accounting, which took everything from the moment it left the production line and entered the warehouse, to the moment when it was shipped and invoiced.

Double a doesn't exist in serbian language, the word for slaughterhouse is klanica. It's just the approximation of the voice one hears when getting them on the phone - sounds so convincingly serious, as if they slaughter bulls.

The staff, as far as we were concerned, was

1) the girls. Operators with not even proper high school, perhaps the local one where they graduated rather illiterate and had to bribe someone 100 DEM to pass a typing course

2) the Nj, i.e. their chief accountant, perhaps dubbed the manager of administration somehow, never bothered to find out

3) the guy who did the payroll, who is a book apart

4) others, whom we met sometimes, e.g. other managerial staff at lunches, or the cerberus on the cattle gate who'd sometimes give us attitude. He may ask for some kind of ID, all of a sudden, as if we didn't come for the umpteenth time already. Of course, the parking was right in front of the administrative building, and it was right at the main entrance, but the main entrance was, as per the longstanding tradition, crammed with junk furniture (everything was new, so lots of junk furniture) and permanently locked, for security reasons. Anyone we invite, or even have a contract with, is a potential thief, saboteur or terrorist, so everybody make the extra 100m to the cattle gate, walk around the building, enter from the yard. Same upon return. This was a perfect composition of two shitty security attitudes: 1) we'll ID anyone we don't like, I don't care if it's the chief's mother; 2) it's nice that the architect built ten doors, but we'll lock nine of them, so we can have control. I've seen either of them in many places (US and Hungary included), but this perfect confluence happened only here.

We ended up having lots of history with them, including the reason why the place is called so (see 11-IX-1990.). It lasted, for me, for as long as I was in DBA, i.e. spring 1994; don't know much about afterwards, as the slaughterhouse, and its farms and egg production and whatnot, were privatized and then reorganized, sold, resold, bankrupted, resurrected etc. They had a shop even in my area until a few years ago, had one on ruža - no matter what, there's always some way to shatter and scatter.

The salaries guy, ouch. Serbian name, muslim surname, and literally the guy spitten out of the jokes. „I'm a bit slow on the uptake, but once I get it, have you no worry afterwards, except maybe in the case you taught me wrong or changed too many things“. And he was right, it took a while until he learned the ropes, but after that the payroll for a few hundred workers would be done in one morning, without error. And if it didn't pass muster at sdk, it wasn't his fault, but rather his boss not staying abreast with the latest changes in regulations and not calling Brata to adjust the code.

When they had their corner in the big supermarket at ruža, the shop window was adorned with a huge slogan out of his keyboard: „Our eggs - your pleasure“ [eggs=balls in many languages, including all of the Balkan]. The legend is still not forgotten.

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Mentions: 17-V-1990., 25-V-1990., 11-IX-1990., Origins of New York, march 1991., The big import, 02-VI-1992., Office dictionary, 17-II-1995., 20-V-1995., 27-VIII-1997., 09-XI-2014., 28-XI-2014., 19-XII-2017., 14-V-2021., 24-VII-2023., 08-VIII-2023., Brata Avramov, DBA, DL2400, Njujork, payroll, rebfpt.prg, ruža, sdk, in serbian

13-XI-2019 - 18-XI-2023