This being a tuesday, just like the last week, I'd say that's when we got Vanji involved, because the scheme then was that we'd use mondays to do work at home, for our future company (which we still haven't officially founded, it was in the air), then monday evening travel to Gemenc, then hit the keyboard tuesday to friday. Near end of hours on friday we'd go to see plus see (cash & carry), which we called see plus plus to get our grocery, then hit the road. The see plus plus was cheaper, thanks to a gimmick whereby it was registered as wholesale, so the retail margin and VAT on it were avoided, and officially it wasn't us who were the buyers, Szoftex was. We'd have some membership card, so whatever we bought was recorded as the company's supplies.
The schema is transparent, what would a computing company do with all that salami, cheese and detergent that we bought. As old smugglers we knew exactly what to buy here and what's cheaper or better at home. Still, this wasn't a smuggle trip rush, where you buy whatever you can find, we had the time and the knowledge that we'll come next friday again.
The salary was about 38000 forints, which is between 200 and 300 marks, which wasn't much but covered the expenses and we could live on that (plus her salary). Of course, I could do nothing with forints at home, unless I sold them to a smuggler, but then the rate wouldn't be so good, so better spend them there and fill the fridge. I brought lots of stuff - instant coffee, sausage, cheese, house chemistry, and vajkrém (butter cream, which was a hungarian invention; our dairy factory tasked B. Lj. from next street here, and she knew his dad who was an education inspector, to build an equivalent; the resulting mleki krem was just about the same as the original).
We waited at the crossing a lot, because FRY was under sanctions (during croatian war first, then bosnian) and there was a gasoline shortage. All the border places on hungarian side engaged in smalltime smuggling of gasoline. Having heard that knowing a language can be tested on two hard things *- crossword and classified ads - I tried the latter first. Once at Ileš's I took the car ads and started reading. Got most of the stuff right on, just one number which every ad had, always between 70 and 220, wouldn't fit. It was bigger in bigger cars, but still didn't make sense, so I had to ask him what the fuck that was. Tank size, said he, how many liters can it carry. They all had extra tanks added to their cars, and reinforced the suspension, because you couldn't drive through the customs with your car's balls touching the ground. That the car's butt is raised high when returning empty, didn't raise any suspicions. Most of them would do an evening run, specially on fridays, and then there were also guys who did nothing else, so they'd manage 4-5 rounds in a day. And we had to wait with all of them, every friday.
Sometimes we'd pass in thirty minutes, sometimes we'd wait all of six hours. I think the record eight hours happened some time next winter. Of course, Vanji being the sworn antismoking zealot, we couldn't smoke in the car. So Joška and I would just walk around, smoke and enjoy the surrounding sociological experiment.
The oldest version of catal6.prg found has today's date. The Catal5 didn't pass Vanji's test - full hand slammed on the keyboard, a veritable emulation of cat walking over it. Catal5 worked on hooks on each possible key, and it would start suffocating when five or more such hooks would fire before the previous one was finished. So it worked in small doses, but I didn't like it.
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* Mihály's take is that you've adopted a language when you catch yourself counting the church bells in that language. I must be mute, then, as I never count that. Though, truth be told, I did catch myself counting or calculating and hearing the numbers in my head in hungarian.
28-VI-2021 - 31-X-2025