We sat with my folks in the afternoon, had coffee. Lena we left in our rooms, in the baby bed, with the sideboard up. At some point here she comes. We shat ourselves a bit, how did she manage to jump out, did she do anything dangerous. Okay, we see she's fine, but... to prevent any outbursts of angst and whatnot that the older ones may choose to perform, I simply asked her to show us how she did it.
So we went back there, and I put her in the bed, and she demonstrated. She did everything exactly right - held the upper edge with her hands while she moved first one leg over the edge, then the other and the butt, holding to the edge so she'd go legs down, then switched her grip to the vertical bars, so when she touched down she held to them and was upright. Perfect, and she was able to do it again.
On fifteenth I see I was at TIK, which is the second metal works in the same bit of a street behind Elmont, somewhere between skrobara and the lower part of ruža, where we had two customers from day one, then soon three, then four... in the end only the gravel yard was not, there in the butt end of the street, next to the river.
Two surprises happened here. First, they told us that it doesn't matter how smart, tall, blonde and pretty may we be, until the chief accountant vets our work, or else we painted in vain. And she was harsh and screwy, everything had to be ship shape. Though, the chief accountants were legally and materially responsible for the correctness of their data, and if it turns out they finked, or didn't see that someone else did, it did occur that they do jail time. With such a responsibility goes the authority, and this wasn't a first such accountant we met, the strictness and precision were the marks of the trade.
And there she was, the ominous sounding chief: Vasilija. Oh, hi there, where have you been, long time no see... We greeted and god knows how, and then there was (a few years later) a tezga for us, to install a main ledger for accountants (the one which could host multiple ledgers for multiple companies in the same tables, or one subdirectory each), who was likewise an accountant in another firm in the same alley. He was a bit of a funny character, this Šurjak guy, nicknamed Teks Viler, seems he was fond of comic strips. I remember visiting him a couple of times, just the outside of his house and the entrance, wouldn't be able to find it now.
The other surprise was that among the locksmiths in the workshop I met G., the only girl in the whole generation of, I'd say, 1983/4 in mašinska, who was almost excellent as a student, four guys behind her tried to scratch a two (see school levels) by copying what she did on tests. The trouble was that she was lefthanded, and her digit nine was slanted from up left to down right, and ended with a straight line, so the first guy behind her took that as a q, and the third one behind as q2. They were so utterly clueless that they didn't even notice that there was no q anywhere in the task...
And I visited the workshop because I heard they could make a splitter for in-floor heater for me. Then it was made as a steel box with two compartments. Six pipes would go through the lower box and the partition into the upper box, and six more would go into the lower box. Quite complicated to make and actually quite unnecessary - twenty years later that was just two pipes with six valves piggybacked in the end, topped with an air release in the end.
Regardless, the splitter such as I ordered was actually made, and here it is, still working thirty years later. How did I pay for this, fuckmeifIknow, guess there was a compensation between them and the DBA, so we got the splitter and they were forgiven some of the debt... The money didn't make sense this year anyway.
16-IX-2023 - 23-XII-2025