The Blog

No, I bypassed correctional incarceration due to the understanding demonstrated by the dairy management (which enterprise in the old-timers' parlance still remained “the milk complex” even when it was sold to an advanced in his years representative of the Californian Diaspora, whose tries at introduction and improvement of something here went on for one whole year).

And what else can you expect of Americans? It took the geezer a fiscal year to realize the hapless futility of his second childhood undertaking midst the worldviews and habits rooted in seven decades of the Soviet voluntarism multiplied by the East subtleties.

After the exhaustive 12 months, Sisyphus from the Diaspora kissed good-bye the too-fucking-complex whole thing, resold the business back to the independent state and flew back home to Glendale, State California.

Such were the most difficult conditions when the diary management benevolently (as was recently mentioned above) met me halfway and, agreeing that a computer is the most necessary attribute in a warehouse economy supervision, forked out a PC, which box, bubbling with the enthusiastic delight, piggybacked I from the second floor of the diary Management Building to the warehouse, the see of my eight-to-five.

My boundless gratitude found an appropriate form in the combining of the rest of computers of the diary management into a unified local network (LAN) with the Internet access and direct connection to the related accounting departments in Armenia, in which undertaking I was assisted by the fitters from the Arminco, the Internet provider company.

The rest would have become the shining history but here comes the bitter word of “but”…

But to the post of Director of the once-again-state-owned enterprise ("the milk complex"), the respective ministry in the government (I'm at a loss which one from the bunch of their lot) invited a specialist from the dairy industry of Armenia (RA) on which nominee they pinned their hope of riddance of the deplorable unprofitability.

Such an illusion was inspired by his business acumen in breeding ostriches on a farm successfully privatized by him near Yerevan, and his unwavering determination in the matters that matter (unlike the guy, you’re not able to eat the lasagna of just one ostrich egg in two days, and on the third one you, of your own accord, will willingly drop out of so a hopeless undertaking).

The accountancy ladies no longer knew where else to stick them those ostrich feathers in, brought by the ambitious gigantomaniac from his still private household…

Yes, vivid negotiations were already underway on the subsidized transfer of ostriches to the Academy of Sciences of Armenia (ASRA), where a scientific research institute was being fervently created for crossing flightless giants with utterly prolific quails.

Also from private farms…

Unfortunately, all the positive features in the director Khachik got annulled by just one wretched limitation, which was his unpredictable insanity—a fly in the ointment, so to speak.

The fits grabbed him several times a day, when he began to choke and yell at the same time.

A terrible sight of a man on the verge of apoplexy but, from my layman observations, he would also get high from the happening…

Given my unwavering inclination to the wholesome protection of the rights of homo sapiens, I can't but support the inalienability of catching buzz along the lines of personal preferences, up to the hardcore masochism – when they get high from self-suffocating.

Well, yes, will I say, since you like it – full speed ahead, provided that your partner does not mind!

However, Khachik was divulging these intimacies of his nature at the shop floor level too, without ever asking the employees whether they liked his at death’s door wheezing.

And outside of the seizures, he was quite normal. Seemingly…

The foreman at the construction of the milk collecting point in the village of Tandzut came with a complaint about the two-ton short supply of cement to the project.

The internal investigation brought to light that Hayk, the supply-getter, got drunk in the building materials store on the day of the cement shipment and flagged the truck off without counting the cement sacks in the dump. The picture cleared up, but the bitchy foreman went and complained to Khachik.

The director called all those involved into his office, threw two fits in a row and barked at me to write the resignation application.

Then he summoned the electrician and right away appointed him the acting system administrator (the connection between the accounting department and the suppliers of foil and other packaging stuff in Yerevan was via the Internet) declaring that "whether electrical or Internetal, they all are just wires – you'll figure it out!."

The electrician Lyova came to the warehouse, where I was already collecting things and he tearfully begged to explain, at least briefly, what was there into where.

And then, already as a geek with experience, irreparably exhausted by the stupidity of dummies, I sent him to read the fucking manuals (RTFM!). Because for anything besides there was no time left…

The issue of my further employment got somewhat delayed. Satenic thought it's a disgrace if her husband joins the crowd of jobless workforce of brawny bums by the Kaltsevoy roundabout awaiting to be hired for an urgent loading-unloading job at an agreed payment. She minded it, and she put her foot down.

For that reason, I became a regular at the Arminco Communications. Which is not the Arminco in Yerevan, but its branch in Stepanakert…

The head of the branch, Sam (that very cat whom years ago I stunned with an illiterate question from the beginnings of computer science) short-sightedly missed telling me “no” at once. Probably the factor of my work, in the previous millennium, together with his parents in the editorial office of the newspaper The Soviet Karabakh had its malicious say.

At 9.00 sharp, I sillily came to the still locked door of the Arminco (knowing that for some time it still would be locked), and when it got unlocked, I entered and sillily sat in the corner of the reception room.

After lunch, the procedure was rerun.

The room was long but not especially wide, which factor diminished its size, but I knew how to take a neat position on a low windowsill, out of anyone’s way, and sat there quiet-silently, except for rarely made old-fashioned compliments to the accountant Irina as the attention sign.

However, today's girls are unaccustomed to such signs and do not know where to stick those fuc… well, I mean, what to do of them at all.

(Or did the wrinkles in the libertine’s mug put them at a loss?)

Sam quite correctly reckoned that such a wrinkled employee would not add to the presentability of his Internet providing branch, yet, because of being stubborn, he obstinately did not want to say “no” to me, but only shrugged his shoulders in unequivocal silence, when passing by my windowsill on the way to his office, in the hope that I myself would get it at last.

These young people are so naive…

Besides filling out accounting forms, Irina also signed contracts with the clients eager of the Internet access at various speed/costs or else she would take coffee to the next room, where Sam's office, for she was his sister-in-law as well.

It was almost a family business and inter-personal relations there had a touch of genuine warmth and returned attention.

And just that family format made their business doomed, although they continued to still buck up each other.

The local arena of the Internet providing was entered by the semi-state company “Karabakh Telekom” (yes! Tommy, yes! KarTel!!) but so as not to let Tommy blow his lid, they shortened the name to merely “KT”.

The production facilities, inherited by the telephone service of the RMK from the times of the Indestructible Soviet Union, were fleshed out with generous financial injections from a Lebanese Arab, who had made his fortune by way of utilizing the means of mobile communications.

He himself did not appear in Stepanakert, but acted through Beirut Armenian shift workers, who monitored the amount of deductions to the state (?) budget of the self-proclaimed and partly independent RMK, which is why residents of Karabakh paid 4.5 times more for the mobile connection of their phones than citizens of neighboring Armenia to the respective telephone companies of their choice. For more than 20 years…

And I did hatch out the moment when Sam had no one to send to an urgent business task along with a fitter named Ararat, because the fitters work in pairs.

Ararat and I went out together, I proved my skill and from that day on, instead of a regular, I became an Internet connection fitter at the Arminco, which Sam did never have a reason to regret.

Firstly, instead of a trash bin devoid of living space by heaps of boxes, and multi-annual offal piles and deposits of UTP wires, of fiber optics, and of all those out of order and (hopefully) still alive devices and connections used in the Internet providing business, as well as everything else (up to machine tools) sunk and lost in those layers and thickets, there appeared a full-sized fitters’ room, as it was designed in the blueprints of the construction project.

It took two and a half months of painstaking sorting during the lulls between connection trips. But I did straighten the mess up!

Not to mention the annoying cases when a box with routers in the stair-case of this or that apartment block in the city, casting to the winds the last shreds of decency, ceases to respond to the most sugary-becoming-brutally-quick-tempered poking of the key in its keyhole.

That is, here is the key, but there is no Internet in the apartments up and down the whole stair-case section.

Sometimes a locksmith is needed more than a fitter.

In that way I learned Stepanakert from above—98.8% of the apartment blocks’ attics served the field for the activities of Internet fitters, it was from there, from under the roofs, that individual UTP cables dangled down to the windows of each and every individual client—and from below: laying many kilometers of fiber optics through the wells and underground pipes for the communicational connections…

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Bottle #30: ~ For The Benefit Of France ~