Woke up and walked around the city. I wanted to find new shoes since my old are killing me, I wanted a pair of shorts so I could go and wash my jeans, I wanted
Woke up and walked around the city. I wanted to find new shoes since my old are killing me, I wanted a pair of shorts so I could go and wash my jeans, I wanted to find a laundry, internet etc etc, I wanted to find a cheaper hotel with more facilities. But I found nothing of this.
The only thing I found was The Printing Company. I was surprised that it was situated at such a fashionable address; I thought it’d be in the suburbs. I didn’t dare to enter but went to the hotel and put on the nicest, cleanest shirt I had. Then I went back. In the lobby of the office building I saw the logo: Atol Production.
I entered and looked confused. A lady asked if she could help me. I said I was looking for Atol Production. She went to some other ladies and asked them and they had a short conversation, looked at me, shook their heads and disappeared.
What now? What kind of behaviour is this? What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with Atol? I started to randomly walk up the stairs. Walked through a corridor, walked up some other stairs. And there it was: Atol Production. There was a picture of a cat on the door. I knocked. No one answered. Perhaps they were out for lunch? I tried the door and it opened. On the inside there was a large empty room. I looked around and there was nothing there, except for some flyers advertising some bar, indicating that a printing company had once existed here.
It was a long time since this company answered any of my e-mails. Perhaps they had gone bankrupt.
I went to the tourist information and looked up the number to the company. I wanted to ask the very helpful lady there if she could phone them for me (in case there’d be a Czech voice saying that this number does not exist anymore, so go to hell and swallow your dreams). But she seemed determined to talk on the phone all day so I took a walk to the train station instead. On the way there I was thinking about what to do now. I felt like I was thrown back months in time. Perhaps I should ask the game-crazy graphic designer in Turkey if he could find a suitable printing company for me? But what about customs? Would I have to fill out dozens of forms? I hate filling out forms. I wish this Atol Production could just start existing.
I found a phone booth at the train station which swallowed coins without giving phone calls. Then I bought a phone card and it worked.
“Dooot … dooot … dooot … dooot …. Radim!”
“Hi this is Harald Enoksson from Sweden. I am here now.”
Radim came and picked me up at the train station. The company had recently moved to another location, to Semtin outside Pardubice. It was fortunate that I came here, because they had had trouble understanding how I wanted my game printed. Each marker has a Hiragana and a Katakana side, but it was hard for them to understand what images belonged together and so on. Now we could sit with the graphic designer and sort all things out. They said that they needed the marker graphics to have a 3 mm margin or the cutting would cause ugly white lines around each marker. I said I would like to arrange that but that I had no computer … so they let me sit and work here in the office. It took some time to regain the graphic skills. And then when i had done all the 552 images, then we realised that I had done them wrong, so I had to go through the 552 images again. It took some time.
In the meanwhile, all the workers had left the office. And long before I was done they came back with lots of beer and urged me to stop working. We started with a night tour of the city; the old square; the castle etc. Then we went back to Atol to drink beer; talk about life and play with the cage mice.
