After China, she's now on a trip to Slovakia. For some reason I imagined this was in 1991, but then the stamp in the passport wouldn't lie. The tourist group that the agency gathered was mixed, but they did gather a few folks from the inspection - I recognized a few that I met, and specially Stana.
Meanwhile, at klaanca, the girls had trouble with their boss, who got his nickname around that time (Nj, see 11-IX-1990.). They were semiliterate, their school level was to bribe their way into getting a typist certificate, i.e. they could type alright, but don't trust them with punctuation and other finer points of what they type. Now entering the lookup table of customers was already beyond their abilities, and understanding how any quotation marks would affect the incremental search (the app did have some precursor of catal6.prg, probably something around version 2 or 3) was above their heads. So customer names wouldn't begin exactly with the name, there were all kinds of quotes, and serbian „“, being absent in juski, were often simulated as double comma and double apostrophe. Or various abbreviations, which would grammatically come before the name in the official full name, that they put first, thus defeating the incremental search.
(Un)fortunately Nj understood it, so he forced them to go back and edit the names to be searchable. Not quite understanding what they did wrong, they made him into a famously harsh boss. He actually wasn't, he was an intelligent guy. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time there, sometimes the whole first shift, and I'd drink perhaps three coffees there, to the point when they said „a cup is no good for you, you need a coat hanger, a bag and an IV drip“.
The trouble with coffee in Njujork is that they're Bosnians there, they like their coffee thin and sweet so they can sip it slowly. Luckily, at klaanca they made it strong, but unfortunately still too sweet. Several times I tried to explain how little sugar I can take, but no, it still came too sweet. I finally gave up and said „no sugar at all“, which they thought was insane, and were casting suspecting and worried looks at me when it arrived. This was the first good coffee I had there, and I never looked back. Ever since then, it's coffee without sugar, the best. Sugar was just hiding too much of the taste. Had this not occurred, I'd never have realized that.
Megdonalds was opening in Belgrade. Two of our customers, the dairy and LebarProm, got the contract to manufacture the cheese slices (unformatted*) and the buns for them. We sampled both from the trial serieses**. Oh fuck. The cheese was worse than dairy's melted cheese, which was made from leftovers and substandard runs of regular cheese, and was only interesting being so sliced to floppy disk size and wrapped in translucent plastic. The bun was spongy and stuck to teeth, which we all found disgusting.
Much later I realized they stuck to the specs as ordered, so the stuff was made exactly how it should be.
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* v. 02-VI-1992. - someone just noticed how the cheese would fit into a floppy drive, and we actually inserted it there, with the plastic wrapper, and issued a „FORMAT B:“ command. The drive detected something in it and started spinning, with the tiny lamp on for a few seconds, then failed to detect a floppy and stopped. The moment was hilarious, and ever since anyone seeing these slices would ask „ah, but was it formatted?“ - specially Fefi, who was the MC on this attempt, when someone brought twenty of them from the dairy.
** there was more than one trial, hence the plural.
27-II-2020 - 10-III-2026