Post #2750194

2026-05-04 23:30 UTC

After cycling through a variety of short assignments, including stacking tea crates and working reception at the Royal National Institute of the Blind ("the elevator is on your left") I was placed at Ernst & Whinney on the 10th floor with an eye level view of the clock tower on the north side of the river. This was before the surveillance state so it was no problem to blow through the term of a work visa until I decamped to Yugoslavia for a cycling trip down the coast from Trieste, Italy to Dubrovnik. The Yugoslav inflation rate was around 2500% that year, so they had just started printing the 50,000 Dinar note when I arrived. They started printing the 100,000 Dinar note about 3 weeks later. A barkeep told us that 25,000 Dinars was "good pay for a month's work 10 years ago and now it's 2 beers". (Unconfirmed but good story!) Shops handed out candy in lieu of small change when making a purchase.

Replies (2)

@pws@social.coop 2026-05-05 11:58

Funny thing about working at E&W... the office was full of Macs but the process to requisition software was onerous, so I became the guy who went around copying software from one machine to another (ie, the unofficial office pirate). Nobody cared how it happened and I didn't give it a second thought. They just wanted the latest copy of Microsoft Word and a day later it was there like magic. I was everybody's friend. The rest of the work involved typing dictation recorded on tapes, using a pedal operated tape player. I was the typist for around 40 management consultants. Many of them worked on joint venture projects in the Baltic region, and it was actually kind of interesting to see how the money machine worked on things like forestry projects in Latvia. This was a much more plush typing job than the typing pool which was something like 50 women sitting in rows in one room typing all day, and far better than opening business-reply mail on a slicing machine.

Open ##2750195
@wilpercy@beige.party 2026-05-05 01:07

@pws@social.coop I did almost the same trip in reverse. 1985, train to Split, cycled down to Dubrovnik then back north up the coast and via Plitvic. Finished in Venice. Many happy memories. #CycleTouring

Open ##2750197