Back to work, this time over Horgoš, for some reason, probably a better crossing, as the Bački Breg was too full of smugglers and the staff weren't used to this much traffic. The Horgoš/Röszke was faster, it being on a more important road, it had to be better organized and therefore faster.
The sales of DentoSys got somewhat stuck, even with no competition. We even got some guy to be the seller, he gets 30%. Wow, buddy, don't tell me that selling is so much harder than making...
While waiting for some result to come from this guy, Mihály came up with a triper. He took me to Pest, to talk with... not quite the health minister, though some connections were hinted at, but rather the editor of the doctors' society magazine or some such thing, so that the magazine would run a positive critique of DentoSys (written by Mihály himself, or by some local dentist who already uses it), for nothing... except Szoftex may be perhaps willing to contribute to the permanence of issuing of the magazine, voluntarily and perhaps even anonymously. So the doctors' association's magazine is a payola... eh, the capitalism.
The talk itself is of some interest to me. First off, it was in an old building in some sidestreet in downtown Pest, not even close to shine and glamour of what I'd expect, it looked more like a staff room of a provincial weekly twenty years ago. Second, my hungarian was just good enough not just to stay abreast of the conversation, but even to contribute here and there, which was, I suppose, the reason I was here and not one of the two Hungarians (Joška or Vanji).
There's really something to it. Just like Ileš would frequently grumble when some aborigine caused the traffic to get stuck, "what are you waiting for, a directive from Budapest, get going you idiot, may your internal Kádár fuck you". And he was somewhat right, the Hungarians had fourty-some years of drill to learn to not think, not decide, to wait for orders to come from you know where, you know what happened to that guy who got it into his head to bring on his own decisions, how seriously he got fucked up... And that's why we reigned there these years, we who came with experience of surviving 1993, with reflexes which can outrun any inflation or sudden change of rules. And I don't mean just the three of us, there were many who opened small businesses here and traded in anything they could find. Because the aborigines didn't understand that the directives from the central are no more, it's stick to your guns now, you're in the market now. So if Mihály got the idea that he may impress the guy by showing his own hired yugo, there probably was some sound reasoning in it. We had the fame.
Though I don't think it helped much. Even though the app was ship shape, had all it needed, including the famed export to floppies for the ministry, for which the practice would get 2000 HFR per floppy (and would save uncounted hours of work which would now not be spent on filling the forms for the ministry), only a few dozen were sold, as far as I know. Perhaps some number went through other channels, I really don't give a damn, I'm not getting a percentage, I'm just a worker employee here.
We did write that install floppy generator for DentoSys, which kept all the data on the disk, to be able to make a spare copy if the first one was bad - and it was also tied in with defg.prg, so one floppy could be used any number of times, on any number of machines, but all the app's instances would have the practice name, phone and address welded in, and these would show onscreen and in headers of all reports, and there was also the code in that floppy for the ministry. And if anyone messes with defg.prg, the checksum won't match and the app will refuse to work. So the number of forty or sixty sold is probably right, unless the generator was run from more than one machine - but in that case, if any of such users made a phone call, hope that the right person takes the call. So, the sales flopped, nowhere near the expected 2000, no hope to park the merc on the door...