It seems we started attacking Sombor and the area, I remember sitting with Vanji there at some school, where I even installed something, and it turned out a fool's errand (or „putuj, dupe, za kašiku supe“ - travel, ass, for a spoon of soup), nothing came out of it, though he did make few phone calls later and maybe even got some money out of them. The other, more interesting customer was a stambena in the area, where we found DBA's apps which Ileš peddled and later quit. The machine was a misery, some 286 or so, at least four years old, one middle aged lady worked alone, and kept complaining about some con artist having sold her some leather bound encyclopedia or whatever, payable in 12 installments, for which she signed the contract pre-printed on the autcopy paper where the top page was shorter by some three or four articles. These clauses made it possible for him to foreclose on the debt and even charge her with late fees on some technicality. Scum of the scum, the guy was so sure that it wouldn't occur to anyone to check whether the pre-printed pages were identical... And he, of course, performed some sleight of hand, leaving her with one of the copies and not the top page, so she can't prove anything. Don't remember how it ended for her; for us it was a lunch at a restaurant's terrace, facing an endless meadow with horses grazing, perfect.
The only trace of that trip is one routine where I'm putting together the data from the main ledger and the analytics from the old DBA apps into one transactional table in the format my main ledger was using, without any major problems, sixty lines altogether. The date on it is second of september. The time is weird, 6:52 - could it be I remembered to touch it a little in the morning before the trip? There's an almost identical conversion routine for our accountants, dated 13th of october.
I wonder now whether Sale knew that Ileš was peddling his apps... Probably did but let him off the hook, as he at least brought several big customers - one kombinat (at least their sales department), and six-seven larger farms and whatnot. The small fish in the area, like this one, could easily be left to him, it still was almost just as profitable as that accidental gambit with Savo Brandić and the electric networks.
My girls were watching Cassandra these months, one of those endless southamerican series, and my then box was about 3m to the side, so I could watch it if I wanted to, and couldn't avoid hearing it. I barely peck spanish, by analogy to other romanic languages which I know equally little of... so when I heard that it's the last, 250th episode, I said I may now start watching it, if only they'd be kind to brief me on the plot so far. Nina, dad's smartalec, said „first you tell us what you already know, and we'll fill you in“. Okay, told them all of three sentences I knew, mostly gathered from overhearing, and she said „that's it, you've missed nothing“.
Luckily there's wikipedia, so it clearly says when the last episode was broadcast - they started on 10th of february, finished now... must have been an episode a day. True, then they should have run until 18th of october, this must have been doubles on some days. Then they switched to Llovisna, and in parallel reran Cassandra on the 2nd with three months' delay behind the premiere. The one before was also popular, the „Wild rose“ (Rosa salvaje), which was, also on third, from april 1996 to january 1997... but this is still not right, that one had 199 episodes. And Cassandra... what, 150 it says, not 250? Then... let me try, aha, it ran five episodes a week, now the calculation fits. I have the correct date.
9-VIII-2022 - 19-X-2025