september 1992.
The pipes in the rest of the big room, plus the view into the bedrooms - the smaller bedroom (left) already has the concrete laid. And (now I see!) both bedrooms already have the tiles laid. Which means that the tiles guy did put the tiles and the bathroom soon after this. I found him by accident, visiting Gargamel's office (now in rented space in the heating/power plant, not too far from his warehouse) for some reason (ah, there was a labor inspector visiting), and while I was waiting for some result that I printed to be checked, we chatted about this and that. And the other girl (not the dark beauty who was my customer - and later worked in that pencils' outfit with Marina) said her husband does tiles. And he's from Vir...
One of the weekends I had another moba, this time all the folks from DBA - Vanji, Fefi, Rade, Sale, perhaps Željko, perhaps Blaža and most probably Števa. We poured the fine concrete over the heating pipes. Which is not exactly pouring, this is almost dry and you press it and tamp it to be flat. The bedrooms were already done by that guy who did the plastering, so it was only the bathroom, lobby, kitchen and the big room - so about 50 m2 out of 83 (the 2 in the pantry remained uncovered, the pipes end there and then there's that tunnel as well.
It went quite fine, considering that I was the only one who saw it done before. Consequently, I was the engineer.
The picture shows how the tubes were laid out in the dining (closer part) and the kitchen (farher). The contraption on the wall in Johan's room (aka pantry) is the distributor. The rest of pipes to be done next year.
Nice weather and I think I had just a crate of beer. Perhaps some of dad's rakija circulated as well. Amazingly, we finished before dusk, which comes around 19:00 this time of year. Technically, still summer, but everybody had long sleeves and trousers.
These days I heard Vanji went to help Kid do a general repair on his lada - changing the head synch chain, realigning the valves, that kind of thing. On that car, it could be done in a day.
Few days later, when the concrete had set, I got that guy from Vir. Only he didn't do much in terms of glue, but rather used half-dry sand concrete as glue. Of course, he first used the glue for the yellow-brown tiles (the girls' room and the lobby, found only that much on the place where they sold the leftovers from Gik's construction sites) and then put the rest with this dry sand.
Interesting guy, from Dalmatia (actually the same island where we spent our last vacation there, five years ago), married to a girl here, who (has a friend who) works at Gargamel's, and then had trouble back home because he married a Serbian. So they fled here. I just asked him to try to speak dalmatian again, I miss hearing it.
By the time he was finished for the day, we sat on the terrace and had a brandy. The dialog went like this.
- What pleasure do you find in living like this, watching into each others' gardens?
- Well so are the lots laid, this is the only way to build here. What would you rather have for a view?
- Ah the sea.
- Well screw that, you're thickly late.
True, some aeons ago, the Pannonian sea was here. We actually found shells in the clay when we dug the basement. Perhaps river shells, but a false proof doesn't really disprove.
For the bank in Plandište we ordered some document printer, Olivetti's... which is yet another senseless naming blunder, as if any other printer is incapable of printing a document. The trick was actually in its purpose, as it was not primarily intended for printing on blank paper, though it was quite able to do that as well, but rather to print at an exact position on a pre-printed form, e.g. to fill in the data in a virman or add a transaction into the first available row in a savings booklet. Which I was tasked to do, as bank apps were all mine anyway.
The trouble was that I couldn't make it print anything, no matter what I tried. The manual, translated miserably and printed with insufficient ink on some jerked away old mimeograph, contained a few valid escape sequences to position and format text, but something was missing, some initial set which would define the graphic context, set up the printer and put it into a state when it would be ready to accept commands. We talked with the printer's seller, some fuckers' office on Novi Beograd, who confessed that they don't understand how we got that printer in the first place (through that same fucker from Plandište, that's how), specially how we got it without their banking app, they sell them bundled. Also said they never heard of a case when anyone ran that priter without that app. The matter was settled when we bought some of their app, on a floppy readable from Dos (they, of course, did everything in some Unix). Even this deal was mediated through the same fucker. Mediated - we'll pay 1500 DEM for that. And one morning I drove to Belgrade, met him somewhere near Savski square, and then we drove to Novi Beograd, found that office [few weeks after writing this, a photo of the building came up in the news and I recognized it: Energoprojekt], heard few more details... Allegedly, there should be such an escape sequence, somewhere in those apps (toldya!), which app sends to the printer, but they have no clue where it would be, they didn't write it, they were just reselling it. I guess translated it too.
And I brought that floppy to the office, copied it into a blank directory, and launched Dos Navigator to look for escape, one file at a time. And did find it, in something driver-like, it looked like... Well, I copied those ten bytes, and added them as a prefix to the regular printer commands I already had. At a rate of 150 marons per byte, a pittance.
And that's where I got lucky, got it all working in two days. Devil may know what a loss we incurred with those 1500 marks, but fuckit, the honor and reputation of the firm were at the stake. By the following week my app neatly printed new lines into savings booklets of Plandištans.
Mentions: Aleksandar Raskov (Sale), Blagoje Vrbović (Blaža), DBA, Ferenc Farkaš (Fefi), Gik, lada, Marina Čikezin, moba, Ostojin (Gargamel), Rade Peretić, rakija, Stevan Garaj (Števa), Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), virman, Zoltan Čonti (Kid), Željko Žaja, in serbian
17-X-2020 - 13-VII-2026