Among the first customers of DBA there was a wheat mill, somewhere in a village near romanian border. They bought several applications, the most important one among them being the payroll. I went there the first time, installed the general tools that we had at the time, but we couldn't install the apps themselves because they were packed with pkarc.exe and we couldn't find, on any of the twenty-some diskettes we had, the unarc.exe. Nothing to unpack with. The pkzip.exe didn't exist yet, we got that later in the year.
The next day the team went again, without me, and later recounted the whole event, at wide and large, and this story is something I heard several dozen times, about a third of it from my own mouth.
The payroll had to be done that day, because some regulation would change the next day and they'd not only have to do a lot from scratch, they'd get less. Each regulatory change was another limitation. The old logic that „nobody gets (unjustly) rich on my watch“ has already grown into a federal policy, cutting the spending almost always started from the salaries, then called „personal income“. It would largely stop there, too.
So Brata installed the app there, and they entered the workers' main data, the list of taxes and contributions and their sdk accounts to which they will be paid (or he brought along one from previous customers) and then the eights (i.e. hours worked). While they worked on it, one girl kept saying „šef*, pull out the mouse“. The boss was a polite guy, and pretended to not have heard this, he wouldn't pull it out in public, in front of other ladies.
When they finally got to print the payroll and all the virmans to take to sdk for controll, it became clear that a mouse had chewed some cable in the printer. Then they phoned around and only in the sixth place found a printer they could borrow to finish it. In the end, the salaries passed.
„Salaries passed“ was the phrase we heard hundreds of times, and it meant that the calculation was correct to a para, all the taxes and contributions were correctly calculated, virmans filled in with correct amounts and account numbers, everything fits and sdk allows the whole thing to be actually paid out. It sometimes happened that it doesn't pass, and then the wrong parts had to be redone, bad papers printed again etc. The correction would perhaps pass the same day, sometimes three days later. Worst case was when the delay would make it a victim of some new regulation...
Except the one semester in the elementary when we had the soy croissants and yogurt, I had absolutely no habit to snack anything between breakfast and lunch. But seeing now how others have it, I joined them a couple of times, for company and to give it a try, see how it goes. Later I'll do this more often, as field work becomes more frequent. Having offices in Dom, the nearest kiosk with hamburgers (the pljeskavice were somehow out of fashion, didn't fit our hi tech trade and the incoming nineties) was Ciki, just across the Little bridge. Nena knew the owner from somewhere, and was in on how to order and what he had. This was the first time I ate some such thing, barbecue with salad beyond the chopped onions, but lots of other stuff - sour cream, leaf of lettuce and the like. Even bigger novelty was the freedom of choice, the add-ons were your choice, which wasn't so heretofore, everyone knew that you get whatever the guy puts in, willy nilly. There, it's not only us who are on the market, these kiosks are too, the customers are pandered to.
And it wasn't bad at all. I was just quick to give up on those liquids that smear the beard - mustard, kečap (ketchup), majonez (mayonnaise), cream, no bro, will not do.
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* šef is chef but in its literal french meaning, chief.
6-X-2021 - 16-V-2026