Getting into a routine at stour. I was supposed to work on Partner, as that was the job description, but then there was only one of those and Joži was mostly on it, so I mostly sat and read the documentation. He was politically active in Čurda, sometimes even organized meetings for a few people in the sideroom (after initially trying to use Radoja's office, which also served as a club and room for small meetings and coffee, having a long table with nine chairs). He was eventually elected the president of the local community, aka director of the village :). He'd be absent for this or that meeting, or got sick, whatever, so I did get a chance to work on that machine. I was actually reworking the apps from pdp and its own version of Cobol into CP/M and m$ Cobol, which were mostly compatible.
Over time I got more work on the PDP, as my job description gradually faded away, but then by spring returned to the Partner when the troubles with stambena began mounting. This mix of a tezga and a regular job was okayed, because it was Presprom, a member of the stour, which sold them their Partner, so we were servicing the sale. Even better, next year they bought a triglav, again from Presprom, so there was no problem in our working semiofficially for them.
Some time this month (and, probably, stretching into december) several things happened. One, my party paperwork from mašinska had arrived and I was officially transferred to the party organization of the RZZS (common services) here. Luckily, there weren't too many of those meetings, and they were held mostly during office hours, so no big deal. Even more boring than back at school, about even more irrelevant stuff. The interesting times that were coming up weren't felt at all.
I did get one duty once, to retype the paper the chief of plan and analysis, which the stiff and unattractive comradess (despite being a blonde, really, repelling) gave me, to print it on the dot matrix printer. Which was okay, I'm not your dactilographer but I'll do this because I'm new here, because it's simply something the party gave me to do, and, eh, not that I had anything else to do at the time. So I did it, and I was disgusted with the language. That was exactly the kind that made the party unpopular, they had their set of phrases in fashion, words that meant one thing out on the street and a different one in partyspeak, and mostly the style that nobody, even themselves, ever used in face-to-face communication. So I redacted it into a separate, translated version, where I removed all the fluff and said the same stuff in normal speak. Printed both, and gave her the translation, just to see her reaction. Oh, the wasp's nest. I just said „ooops, sorry, wrong version, here“ and pulled the original from the top drawer. Wish I kept a copy of both.
The guys would stay overtime, because there were some games on the PDP. Nothing much, snake and perhaps six or seven such games, including two solitaires. It was an internal tradition to, in case a name was needed to enter into the top ten scores, that Radoja's name was used.
One of the guys announced he was leaving, and another tradition was to have a little farewell party, starting in the last working hour of the day. We eventually moved to some cafe in Gimnazijska, behind the other side of the main street. These cafes were all open in the last year or two, and by this time there must have been at least eight of them. I think I got seriously drunk, though not to the degree where I couldn't ride my bike home.
Then I wondered why did I get drunk. What's wrong - I got to where I wanted to be, the money wasn't bad, we started building the house, life has taken a good course, so why? Then it dawned on me that I just saw a guy leaving the ship I have boarded. Did I just pick a backwater, some damnation yard? Kept that as a warning to self, to ponder in the future and watch for signs.
24-X-2023 - 20-XI-2025