English / 27.05.2020 / 816
Being able to give out grades is the greatest management skill one could acquire 
Under her management, construction bosses turned into obedient children. Her orders were treated like homework — they would often forget to do it, and when they did, they’d blush as if they were young girls being told off. So, I was sitting down and contemplating:
— How? How can this woman make forty-year-old men turn into small boys and explain themselves, as if they were C students standing by the classroom board? What is the deal with that? Maybe she had some kind of a special voice? A posture? The most advanced hypnotizers would not be able place themselves that way… What is her secret?
Destiny, as if it was some kind of a mockery, always made me bump into other teachers.
Some were in control of millionaires, other hypnotized bigger audiences, and if gentlemen in suits were raising their hands to ask questions… then they were simply laughed at.
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The destructive energy of creation...
Philips and Sony unveiled their invention, the CD, in the ’80s. Owners of music studios tried the novelty out. How can one make a music lover buy a Beatle album again? Release it on a new medium.
The production costs of the CD were lower than those of vinyl, and yet the invention was being sold for more money. Music producers destroyed the vinyl market and set revenue records. The ’90s were the platinum time for studios.
Dentist's Spartakiade. Or the life of Spartacus
— I used to run like a wolf! I looked at everything in a skirt. And now?.. — says Sparta-cus — a strong man in his 60s.
— The computer is frozen — I can't do an X-ray. Let's go for a smoke, — Spartacus is the dentist of dreams. Even in the middle of treatment, he can offer a smoke break on his balcony, the way to which is through the hallway with a shelving unit. On the shelves are Soviet books on dentistry with new-fashioned magazines...
“The problem is, Nikolai, that you never finish anything you start. You don’t even have a degree,” my girlfriend scolded me. We were on the subway.
She had just received some money to make a website, where she would eventually put up some boring local news. The site had dramatically less subscribers than even her Facebook page. In a couple years, the project went bankrupt. But she never lost her faith in the magical formula:
“You need closure. Every beginning has an end…”
A fat writer Dima Bykov in poor health with his head held high has distinguished himself. He has decided to rank in descending order the passed away colleagues. Some of them has been ranked first, others take second and even third places. Sergei Dovlatov has been taken down a peg next to his classmates. The teacher Bykov gave him a satisfactory grade. He even didn’t hide that he wanted to give him a poor grade.
Dima Bykov has unleashed a war on social media by his ranking. Somebody noticed that the teacher is not good even at his own domain. Someone replied that he have been aware of Dovlatov’s bad marks... I was astonished by the desire to make value judgements about literature and even the literary characters. This approach reeks of the judgments of school teachers. It's not the most pleasant aroma...
