I know it was summer but not quite, so probably september, but could have been june as well. We were still interested in doing things on Partner, but not as a straight translate of cobol code from pdp or Vaha, because Joži was already doing it and it didn't go too famously. So let's see something else. Radoja got wind of Iskra Delta having a sort of generator, AGP - avtomatski generator programou - so he sent me to a two-day presentation of it to their unit in Novi. The screwup was in my travel order being ready at 7:20, and the last bus leaves at 7:30. The next one goes at 9:30 and arrives at 11, and the thing begins at 9 on Satelit suburb. So fine, I said, I'm off to hitchhike. Žića's driver took me to the west exit of town and left immediately, as he had to be somewhere at 8. And behold the miracle, within 15 minutes I get a ride - the stambena's lada. The driver recognized me.
Turns out their CEO had a stroke and he's taking him and his wife to Novi, for a treatment at the hospital. The driver is a jack of all trades, greased with every lard out there, a city bum who knows everybody and everything about them, been everywhere and can reach everywhere...
They dropped me by the hospital, which is the area I know - the place where whe had a room as a student is within a kilometer. I caught the next bus down Futoška, asked which stop to take for Satelit, and get there neat and square, exactly on time. Right when they started handing out their standard fare, excellent coffee and frozen orange juice, same protocol as in Gorica. Between me lighting a cigarette and taking the second sip, one of host girls shouts my name, "has a phone call". What the fuck? The operators from stambena calling... just to let me know that they know where I am (of course, within these 25 minutes, the driver got rid of CEO and wife, managed to call home and tell the whole story, and they had dug out the phone number where to find me). And, ah, by the way, a question about the app. They'd find me on the Moon if they needed me.
Later Radoja explained why programmers take vacation on Lastovo - there's no phone service on the island. One guy did go there for real, and so they couldn't find him when they tried to open some file he made, as it was protected. When they tried to open it, the system said „enter password“. They wrote it from scratch somehow. When he came back, they asked what the password was. „Every question contains half an answer: enter“.
The next day I already had the travel order and I caught the 6:30 bus, got there with time to spare and saw the rest of it. The generator is bullshit, the code it churns is very limited in what it can do, while the programmer's interface is too complicated, easier to do the whole thing by hand, so we didn't buy. Well, at least I saw what can be done, and didn't even dream that I'll be messing with such software, under the hood, within two years.
Around this time Lidija quit. She was just fed up with all the bullshit, the restrictions on her vacation, the potential responsibility for any data losses even if by someone else's error or by sheer technical malfunction. She went to petefi to be an assistant to some professor, a much lighter job and relaxed atmosphere. Didn't stay too long there either, her husband was in the upper echelons at the post office, I'd say telecom, and after one or two academic years they moved to Belgrade, when he got promoted.
12-VIII-2021 - 20-XI-2025