23-IX-1993.

Doing the interest calculus for the nearby Gik. Their HQ and erc occupied the upper floors of the sdk building. The famous M, who was the boss of erc until about '91 was now gone. She became famous among us for having bought a punch card reader in 1988 (!). The guys (Bogdan among them) celebrated the event by making a huge "WITH READER INTO XXI CENTURY!"... The same year when Presprom sold them a triglav with four terminals. Amazing.

Bogdan then went to the textile kombinat, and she was replaced with Mima, who then turned to be one more in the string of ladies who could just sit and watch me work (apart from the girls from stambena, there was an old lady from Presprom itself, and an accountant at ms, and a certain Marina at a village wholesale), amused by my concentration and the speed of fingers on the keyboard. This time I took this as a real compliment, she's a colleague, as much of a mathematician as I am.

There's a bit of a side story around Gik. First, when we went to negotiate, look who's the CEO... that timewaste of Crkvenjakov, I know him from the bus, kept seeing him downtown, including on that theatrical festival of seventytwo, just another šećerana guy like me, and he's a director now... He started spewing some phrases, just to give the thing the due seriousness and then he handed us over to his aged accountant.

It was borderline ridiculous. We were like doing the main ledger for Gik, after they already had, twenty years ago, a time share in the IBM 360, had the whole team bro, even Radoja worked there. Then they had the triglav, and the bosses of the erc were, in order, M. then Bogdan and now Mima... and now this old fart, out of retirement now as a consultant, tells me how to do the ledger. Well fuckit who's crazy here, didn't anyone here even see a main ledger app? There must have been serious problems with what they already had, must have had bugs, because the old man Šejek insisted on partial sums per each page of the daily insertion records, what with carry from previous page. And it didn't matter that I explained that this will always check out, because he's seeing the total of the same numbers, over and over, just totalled in different order, never mind, just you write it so, so I can have a correct log of carry totals, that's my check. Okay, I can always write an emulation of the manual work. Explaining that fox won't add them wrong (but it will, in a couple of months, when the totals become longer than 16 digits), but a finger may slip and type a 6 instead of 9, and that will pass your check and it still won't be correct. I did as he asked. Only a good user is a good user.

Soon Mima found a way to unobtrusively leave and go to mašinska to teach, and her assistant simply took over. He was an interesting character, a Lala from her village, tall, bearded and strangely silent. Even when he'd utter something, it looked as if he took a long time to think how tu use fewest words possible. Guess because he was always looking far out, perhaps at the new glass cage across the square.

The interest calculus was a big thing these years, due to insane inflation. First it was something to scare customers into paying the base debt, but then things got serious. We had banks and lawyers and regular companies all trying to sue anyone they could, just to stop money rotting in pockets of others. The method was conform, i.e. with annual interest being recalculated into daily portions not proportionally, but rather as fractional exponent of the multiplying factor (the better explanation is in january 1989.). The whole thing was weird to the unitiated, which includes many bank managers.

It's not a cramped room, there's just many of us

I usually had a PC at home, because now we (DBA) could afford it and because there was lots of work to finish anyway. This also meant I had to have enough games for it - Prince of Persia was popular at the time, Tetris still strong, few 3d versions of it (something called Welltris, and blockout, of course).

In other news, the Robna kuća Beograd (Belgrade department store) on the main street closed recently. It was named Nama since forever, but very few remembered that it's an abbr. from „narodni magazin“ (people's stor[ag]e) Someone spillt the beans about them having some furniture on stock, so the state forced them to sell it at some three week old prices. They sold it all in two days and closed the shop. To that, Škrba says he heard of a guy who spent one whole salary to buy a corner set [of furniture], a television set and two cassetophones. I replied „there's gossip about a guy who bought a freezer box for less than a hundred morons [german marks] and when he unpacked it at home, found a color television inside. Just don't know whether that happened here or in Pančevo“.

Not to mention the movie[ theatre]s*... "Vojvodina?“ The lease ran out, and "Banat-film" didn't find the cash to extend it, so ZZ [farmers' cooperative] Zrenjanin leased it to "Šipad" [bosnian furniture and lumber]; now these guys having gone bust as well, I don't know what's in the hall now, in the lobby there's some boutique with models by Mirjana Marić. While "Šipad" was in there it was quite interesting, a furniture salon with sloped floor, except the stage on which the marital beds were :). On the ground floor (two floors below, on the very riverbank) is the amateur theatre and bar, "Drama workshop Centar", and beyond it the staircase leads up to pivnica.

Even the albanian bozadžija [boza being a soft drink of somewhat fermented corn farina] who worked the lobby, moved out together with the movie [theatre].

And the movie [theatre] "Avala" vanished under the magistrala, "Balkan" was converted into, I guess, some kind of disco, and kino garden also serves some hospitality business; there's a projector in the ninth community [centre] (don't know if it ever was a movie), and in the hall by šećerana (not working as a movie [theatre] for at least twenty years) and also in Dom (they do show them sometimes).

Go had continued the family tradition of pasting photos on the wall, or rather making a picture wall. There doesn't seem to be any underlying concept here, just to cover the wall as the wallpaper was close to crumbling from the moisture in the wall. The well is on the other side of that wall, and while it wasn't a source of any excess water, it's on a slightly raised platform, and the rainwater doesn't just flow away down the concrete path, it stays a long time and gets soaked by the wall. The concept, if any, was the bands she was listening to, which was probably NKotB at the time.

In DBA the shit, announced this summer, approaches the fan. Sale hired Anđa, his own wife, with the explanation that the next big wad of money is in educating the users, and we only need a lecturer, which is exactly her. Of which nothing ever happened, not a single training course, not a lecture was ever held. She was preparing to be a programmer.

She was teaching informatics in the gimnazija in Kikinda until then, and her travel expenses were bigger than her salary for months already. There were here students on sezam, so I got a bunch of stories about her. She taught Cobol from the sheets which Sale would prepare for her, and she'd copy the lines to the blackboard. Once they nicked her sheets and she didn't know what to do, left the class. Some other time they got the key to the cabinet [specialized classroom] and stayed after class to type exactly what she wrote on the blackboard and then compiled it. They got the typical 200 errors and brought her the listing with errors next time, allegedly they took it to someone's cousin at work. I remember Cobol being such a stupid, single-pass compiler which doesn't give up when it finds an unexpected word in a line, but rather reports the error and then goes on over the rest of the command, and of course it makes even less sense - same logic applied to m$'s on CP/M, or DEC's in stour. You start with 200 errors, fix three, 70 remain. Fix two more, 20 remain. Fix three more, three remain. Fix one, get twelve. Well, her code had so many errors that it would never pass. She, though, never understood why there were errors in the first place.

The school director let her know that the situation with her salary and travel expenses is unbearable, and told her to either move to live in Kikinda, or to find work at home. Didn't threaten to fire her, but it was clear enough.

So she laid an ultimatum to her husband, either find me a job in town or I'll go live in Kikinda. Because the travel expenses being so much above the professor's salary didn't make sense. He bragged to me later that there were several phone numbers he could have dialed to find her a job in five minutes, but he didn't want to mess with such things (because he knew he'd lose those numbers right there and who knows what kind of favor would he be indebted with). Instead, he hired her into DBA.

Soon an addendum to the news arrived from sezam: they made her a glorious farewell party. To which they didn't even invite her.

So the downfall of the company began.

----

* sorry but have to clear the ambiguity - in english, "movie" may mean the piece shown and a place where it's shown; "theatre" may mean live actors or a cinematic show. It's clear in serbian, three separate words: '"film" - movie piece; "pozorište" - theatre (live action), "bioskop" - theatre (cinematographer)

Mentions: january 1989., Interest calculus, Aleksandar Raskov (Sale), blockout, Bogdan Levacki, DBA, Dom omladine, erc, fox, Gik, gimnazija, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), kombinat, Majkrosoft (m$), Marina Čikezin, Merima Tabarski (Mima), MPSŠC (mašinska), ms Rašetić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), pivnica, Presprom, Radoje Maletin (Radoja), sdk, sezam, stambena zadruga, stour, šećerana, triglav, in serbian

22-X-2020 - 13-VII-2026