Hitching back to work. Actually took a bus from home to the border (paid the ticket to Szeged, I guess it would amount to the same), then walked over. There was maybe 15 cm of snow everywhere, and it was a bit foggy. The passport control, this being Hungary, has to type every passport number along with the name and DOB, which then goes to some central computer in Budapest or somewhere. The connection is, as I already heard, mirko narrow beam, which doesn't go well over the fog. Took them several minutes to check it over this connection. I then walked few hundred meters to the road to Morahalom, not having the slightest intention to proceed straight to Szeged. This maneuver will save me 50 km. Looking for a good place to hitch, I felt a sudden and strong urge to pee, so I left my suitcase (the smaller one, of 28-III-1976.) by the road (the same old orange-to-lightbrown leather job we bought in Timişoara in 1976, presently in, I guess, Seattle) and walked over to a nearby fence, perhaps 15m away from the road, and peed there. When I was half done, I heard the sound of a lada Niva stopping... sure, the border patrol. I finished the job, came to them and after a "sorry my gents, one has to... what need?". Papers, of course, which I had, and they were satisfied with, then before they left I asked if hitching is allowed here - no problem, they said. So... it took me maybe 20 minutes, which I used to eat my breakfast (piece of bread with a pohovano steak, no salad) and have a smoke.
That guy took me to Morahalom; I waited almost an hour for the next guy. The big news these days was that Dayton accords were signed and the gasoline smugglers were left with nothing to do. The guy had an Audi coupe with a 135 liter tank and extra suspension in the back. They all had a couple of extra sheets of spring, so when fully loaded they wouldn't be dragging their butts across the border. Could even be dangerous, if they hit a speed bump and had a leak, a spark could do miracles. Now with the tank nearly empty, at perhaps 10% capacity, the extra springs were shaking the vehicle at any minuscule bump so much, that I didn't have to shake off the ash of my cigarette at all. It kept falling off on its own.
This took me to about halfway to Délkút, because he was taking a right there. Rather quickly I got another ride - an Italian, called Nicolá, who said he was frequently in Belgrade, supplying boutiques with fashion items. He lived in his golf and his only furniture was his cell phone. We talked a lot; took me some time to switch gears from hungarian to italian/english mix ("tu sei uno sessantatino", when he heard of my music tastes). He didn't have much of a clear idea where to head to after Délkút, so he took me on my word that I know a nice place where we can eat csuka pörkölt (at Parasztai's, of course), but we first tried to buy some wine at the cellar of that friend of Szoftex, but it was closed. The pörkölt was excellent, but poor Nicolá got all the spines. Incredible - this was my third time there, and never saw anyone get any bones at all. Bad luck. He bought some wine, and checked that his phone was charged, and then we parted ways.
I was alone for the next few days, the guys were taking a vacation, and when the catholic christmass comes, I'll be alone in the office. I've just made a bet with Mihály that I'll write the payroll app (which Ileš has botched, it had everything in the menus but little functionality behind it, it being mostly an unadjusted copy of the app from DBA or Avai, don't even remember which one). So there was a lot of work ahead and being alone was the way to get it done.
This was about that bet with Mihály that I'll write the payroll from scratch. That's acttually Ileš's screwup, he inserted wads of stuff in the menus but there was no code behind it. It was altogether a badly adjusted version of the DBA or Avai payroll app, whichever. The Vizszék water utility was already going bonkers, they paid and it still doesn't work, so they issued an ultimatum: either it works on 6th of february, or they'll do it manually then, and then will buy a different app from anyone out there and serve the bill to Szoftex. So a software hero was needed to pull them out of this shit pit. The bet was a 1000 DEM on top of salary, if it works within the deadline and everything else keeps flowing.
They assigned me an accountant, one Zingermann, old wolf who knew everything that needed to be known, and who fundamentally explained to me every step of calculation, including the progressive taxation and the negative incentive (an amount that everybody gets just like that, until there's an infraction, then they lose some of it, which does miracles to work discipline, this have it then not technique) and other dirty tricks. I conceived it as having a formula for each calculated field and these would be stored in a table, one function per field, and that a big .prg with all these functions would be generated from this table for each run, and the functions would be called while calculating. So the calculation was fully parametrized, and could be modified without rebuilding the app main. It took me several days to make the mechanism work, and even more days to get each function right.
One day, around 27th, I found a radio in the hardware shop's room. Hardly that I'd catch anything on it, no UHF antenna, but miraculously it had very good reception of Novi. They must have had a repeater in Sombor. And then one of that gang, in some midnight emisija, plays Džoni Štulić's version of Cohen's „Partisan“. When he sang „sweet freedom... will it know how to sing...“, I got all soft inside. Where did he get the idea to dig out Miljković, dry genius. Then later I found that anytime he did someone else's song, he did it at least a spear and a half better than the original.
Branko Miljković was a poet, some kind of war generation's James Dean, who got „killed by too strong a word“ (from one of his visionary last ones). The reference is to the lines „will the freedom be able to sing / as the captives sang about her“.
24-I-2019 - 16-VII-2026