To honor and hallmark as proper the five-year presense of the Internet in the history of mankind, in 2002, employing pirated PDFs as well as free tutorials, I rolled out the personal site of a graphomaniac made up of two volumes:

Yes, by that historical moment I had, with bitterness, realized already that the latter in the list of my translations was a late-comer. Why? I was too slow at doing it (and to pronounce war guilty of that sad fact is not quite fair because I should have chosen a quieter, neutral nook for the undertaking, that same Switzerland, for instance, where the Joyce's work was written originally, during the Great War).

So, taking advantage of my being too busy with everyday problems of keeping afloat in the turbulent circumstances as well as absence of the regular state control over the literary life caused by the dust kicked up in the process of the collapse of the USSR, they published a Russian translation of Ulysses, without ever waiting for or asking me. Which irksome trifle still failed to derail the accomplishment of my decades-long work-in-progress and self-publishing it. At my personal site.

Having a hard-copied stuff of yours might feel great, yet, frankly, I'm growing less and less enviuos of the guys with their books printed. A pretty steady growth it is. Popularity? Bosh. A bunch of honest bucks? Wow! But what am I supposed to do with the commodity after a life-long training to survive without two pennies to rub together? Besides, I happened to scrutinize a couple of online pages from that race-winner product of the collective labor by a tandem of translators (two attacking one! snotty youngsters!) which made me pity sincerely that their efforts reached me in the digitized form, otherwise those 2 pages would see the most appropriate way of utilization. According to their own merits, of both the producers and the turned-out shit.

Yet, on the whole, it still was better than if that pair of sorry dimwits would get together for just drinking vodka tête-a-tête or playing cards. Throw-in Fool, for instance…

Thus, the current Internet-jubilee year coincides with the glorious 20-year anniversary of my site—(and here fanfares blare their fanfaronade twining with the roll of Gene Krupa's drums, plop often pops of champagne corks shooting in every direction, thunder rowdy massive cries of a standing ovation, and other splashes of genuinely general exaltment). By now, the volumes-founders had to make room for addition of 3 more volumes and the site itself staunchly resides at sumizdut.narod.ru (huh? ain’t it the most beautifully unobtrusive ad ever? SEO guides take nervous drags at their rolls unable to keep back the envious looks from their webby corner), and when secondarily educated dudes read the site's address as “soomizdoot” in my presence, I do my best suppressing an upsurge of hearty laughter from my deepest innards…

Learning and mastering html and ccs, as well as other pains of trial and error method, were carried out in the computer room of the MUfH branch, since possessing a personal computer (PC) stayed my persistent yet unattainable dream, and I was still banned from the Computer Paradise, the gift of a charitable millionaire to the Artsakh State University (ArSU), to prevent my hypothetically possible espionage for a neighboring state.

Yet, even at the MUfH, the position of system administrator was a short-lived relish and, a couple of months later, a young man emerged there for whom they (presumably) put a word—as subtle as it is proper in the East—into the management’s ear.

In the way of an ad hoc self-consolation, I chiseled of the branch’s authorities the position of the House Manager for me (additional 7 000 AMD or 7 Soviet rubles) and went on learning/teaching Latin at that online-based institution, which labors later let me understand the incantations used in Harry Potter without subtitles or sign language interpretation.

The young man to succeed me on the post of the MUfH system administrator came up with both generous and confidential offer to go on with doing my sysadmin’s job for 50% of his salary, which I declined for the sake of patriotism. The independent state needed young cadres of its own, forged locally. And whenever he got stuck at complex questions in the IT field, I did not send him to read manuals (RTFM!)—as is the habit of too many cocky geeks—but explained patiently…

No job brings less satisfaction than that of a teacher.

A House Manager can, after his working day, look proudly back at the glass he has inserted replacing a smashed window pane—the lambent proof that one more day has been lived thru not in vain.

A teacher is deprived of so consummate a happiness, he cannot say, “Look! when I came here, there was an arid wasteland, I have erected these here walls and had this garden grown. Here you are! Chomp this sweet cherry off the tree planted by my industrious labor-loving hands!”. Alas, it's not a teacher's share, except if only metaphorically.

However, when they are a teacher of Physics, then they do not even have what to distinguish metaphor from hyperbole with nor anything to gauge and prove that on this particular day they did manage to hammer ‘Pi * r squared’ into these boobies’ noggins. Ha! Attaboy!.

But still and yet, what is the effing point, huh? If after the graduation bell (much earlier, of course, but let them play with the comforting thought that at least up to then) there won’t be a smidgen left of their gruesome pointless work. As for the cherry jam, forget that ruby in the sky…

Thanks to the Internet, my daughter from my second marriage, Liliana, located me and, when Ruzanna and Satenic went about setting up their business—selling yarn and knitted products of their own manufacture—and sent me to Moscow after a knitting machine “Brother” (everything on credit! both yarn, and the machine, and renting a room. Everything’s on credit, except for their toil), then I dropped on the way in to Kyiv (the machine tool was not found there) and had an encounter with my daughter and her family…

Internet-bro! To you am I obliged forever!.

However, the 23-ruble side income from the MUfH (15 for Latin, 7 for regular repair of chairs and torn lino in the classrooms) dried up, since the RMK President, who stepped into Arcadic's shoes, dictated to close that educational branch whose students were transferred to the State University, the ArSU.

At first, it seemed to me that the logistics of the reformist move sprang from the desire for increase in income from the ArSU farm, aimed at the growth of gross harvest from the parents bent on their children’s education. But then on the territory of the MUfH branch (a former kindergarten, cozy and spacious), there grew up a compact block of moderately tall buildings for the semi-elite nomenclature of the middle level, and the reformer President turned out to be the owner of the tenement houses.

Of course, the local TV night news never zeroed on the subject, yet everybody down here does know everything about everyone else without television channels too.

Still and yet, I do not rule out that in this particular case they resort to 2-in-1 scheme—liberation of the acreage for the projected construction and multiplying the livestock ear-marked for fleecing…

As for the work at the ArSU, where I had already grown up to the position of a Senior Lecturer, it turned out even funnier there and in the morning, when I went out to copy the timetable for the upcoming academic year, I had no idea it was my last day in the sphere of higher education.

On coming to the English Department, sez I a gentlemanly "hello" to everyone, take a look at the sheet of Whatman paper eagle-spread on the desk of the Head of English Department, all those makeshift marks penciled in the timetable grid, and see clearly – that’s it. No more. I am done.

And somehow absently proceed I to the personnel department office and write the application to please kick me out.

Nonetheless, that whole development in no way had anything to do with the collective subconscious, as in the case of Sevak's eclipse.

No psychology's fault when I've run out of gas. Completely. Not just empty but dry too, the tank.

Later, I got, of course, lectured properly, like, before such quirks you should secure a place to go on with your career. Look at the conductor Mahler, the shrewd schemer would sign a contract on the side, secretly, and off he goes to disclose to his present management (who still got no slightest whiff what the heck) everything he ever thought of their mismanagerial stupidity and—see?—both relieved he is of his current duties in, practically, no time and his chest unburdened. A clear-cut 2-in-1.

Unfortunately, I had never got any regular musical education, but still it didn’t take long to find a fit soft landing – the warehouses of the trading enterprise “Mirage”. Much closer from home and the duties way simpler too: you just picked up and carried so as to put it down there or set it up, or drop it—depending on what you were dragging before: iron rebars, cement in 50 kg sacks or timber sold to the clients of the aforementioned warehouses.

With the team of the “Mirage” loaders I was on quite friendly terms for, as a matter of fact, a hell of a lot of things we saw eye to eye, and when the warehouses—trading in carpets, chandeliers, and kitchen utensils as well—were visited by persons in the know of my past merits and regalia, they were anxious to mostly emphasize their seeing me for the first time ever, while the rare exceptions stayed somehow at a loss to find a common subject for discussion with a dry-land stevedore.

All that was met with understanding empathy, on my part, since I never seek to cross class boundaries seeing the amount of careful effort and stuff invested by a person into putting the barrier up. More than that – I'm ready to travel a couple of additional meters off his/her rampant, given they do not open the window from their "personal space" in my direction…

Three months later, my senior brother-in-law, Valeric, invited me to embrace the position of a warehouse manager at the large dairy plant, where he worked as the Chief Engineer, because of my kinda being a family clan member, although certain Armenian sounds still elude my phonetic capacities…

By that time, phedai Valyo had ceased to be a phedai and became Valera. Besides, he perfectly mastered the Russian language marked by that characteristic stumble (not stutter!) inherent in the communication of the Orenburg Region peasantry.

The foundation for his linguistic achievements served his move to the Orenburg Region for more than one decade (subsequently, the families of his two sisters settled in the same region too).

He got married there. His wife is a beauty, indisputably, yet 10 cm taller than him, so in the photographic session at their wedding party she had to stand with her knees half-bent within in her long bridal gown. She later bore him a daughter.

Valera tried a hand at business (the trade in jeans and building materials), but eventually became a self-employed construction contractor. His specialty are plasterboard ceilings, although his partitions are impeccable too, as evidenced by the Internet site presenting pictures of his works.

For performing repairs, reconstruction, etc., he often sub-contracts a mate.

Once it happened to be the ceiling in the apartment of an army ensign, a Tatar by his nationality. While executing the order agreed upon, Valera cooperated with an Azerbaijani helper. It was easy to work with such an assistant – both communicated in the language they learned first-hand in their early childhood…

The thrice cursed labor it was – my monthly reports to the plant accountancy on the movement of goods thru the warehouse under my supervision!

The enterprise was undergoing a dynamic period sizzling hot with the reconstruction of facilities destroyed in the war for independence, characterized by dismantling and taking to Armenia the assets survived, on the one hand, combined with the restorative efforts at repairing a couple of shop floors employing the workforce of variously specialized construction teams, both local and from the Republic of Armenia, on the other; alongside the adjustive tries to start up production lines based on the raw-stuff obtained locally from the farmers most reluctant to sell milk at the state-set prices and packaging materials brought from Yerevan factories.

There kept rotating such multi-million sums that giving accounts on all of them, at times, set my head a-spinning too, especially because of the supply-getter Hayk, who daily brought a lot of tools, spare parts and materials from different shops in the city, yet kept forgetting to tell me to who namely and what exactly he had distributed, and end-of-month bills from the mentioned shops did not match my notes compiled from his words.

Three years of that ordeal. Without a computer, I would have been imprisoned for systematic large-scale embezzlement long ago.

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…

* * *