A kind of a day of reckoning for my payroll bet. The day when the stuff in Vizszék had to work, or else. I drove there in the morning with Zingermann (he drove this time) and by the afternoon I won two beers on a separate bet from their chief accountant. She wanted an ad hoc report, just three columns - first/last name and the third column of her choice. Ummm.... aha, I thought of a trick and did it, got the beer. Then she asked for two arbitrary columns, and got that, second beer.
Meanwhile her staff kept entering the payroll data, hours and whatnots. It was by 15:30 (almost dark, this time of year), when they entered everything. I ran the calculation. Done in less than a minute - and it's 1000 workers* times 40 fields each, plus 20-some calculated fields, which means as many function calls from that metadata table.
We ran different totals on separate machines, just to check that they matched. Zingermann repeated my total to the last forint, but with the difference of 12 pengö. I nearly freaked out (just to vent frustration; I don't have a panic mode) and wished we weren't on the 1st floor (am. 2nd) so I could jump out the window. Then he said he was kidding - wanted to throw him out instead :).
A long an crazy day, with nice snow in whatever bit of the Alps Hungary has.
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*they were still called that, this is before they were politically rectified into employees