Manage your dream. Your opportunities are endless - Vlad Rekovski

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not! I could not even imagine such a goal for myself. What determines this criterion of success, or the criterion for achieving the goal?

      I believe that the criterion for success depends on the conditions and situation in which a person is at a given time and in a certain space! These conditions can change, and accordingly, the criterion of our success changes with them.

      As time went on, in a few months I gradually joined the team and was already able to independently work in the area of polishing screws and cylinders. I must tell my readers a little about this.

      Imagine a well-known worm mechanism inside a meat grinder, and now imagine it up to five meters long and three hundred and fifty millimeters in diameter. Of course, such orders did not come into production every day, but they did happen. On average, these were blanks from one and a half to three meters and a diameter of up to one hundred and twenty millimeters. Their complex geometry, consisting of several compression zones, made the work even more complex, varied and thus more interesting to me. Our department polished these screws in two stages: the first stage is the primary grinding of the raw metal after milling to the size according to the drawing data, and the second stage is the surface polishing to the required roughness level after the finished parts have passed the heat treatment process in special ovens. The company produced extrusion equipment and spare parts mainly for the chemical and petroleum industries.

      For grinding and polishing parts, there was a simple set of tools, consisting of three special devices, a variety of attachments and sanding paper with polishing wheels. In addition, a set of personal protective equipment was needed: a long leather apron, leather gloves to the elbow, goggles and, most importantly, a breathing mask. I used four of these masks per shift on average. At the end of the work, I had to blow off a layer of metal dust with a compressed air gun, and when I removed my goggles, a bright light contour from the removed glasses remained on my face. These were the working conditions on this site. Our department worked in two shifts, sometimes we had to work at night if the order was very urgent.

      What was the compensation for such a difficult, and besides, not harmless work?

      According to my employment contract, I received 16 DM per hour net, excluding tax. The working week was 37.5 hours. In addition to the hourly rate, compensation for harm was paid – plus 25% to the rate, the surcharge for the second shift was 15% to the rate. Night hours, starting from 20.00, were paid with a surcharge of 50%, and the sixth, overtime night shift – plus 100% to the tariff.

      I was waiting for the result in the payroll for the first month of work with great impatience. And now that day has come, and I receive my long-awaited payroll, in which, after all the surcharges to the tariff indicated above, the income tax was calculated at the rate of 24% of the total amount, and then, in a line below, the amount to be paid is indicated: DM 2950 ( in 2019 this amount is equivalent to the same, but only in euros). What could an ordinary working person afford with this money in 1994 in Germany? I’ll give you some examples:

      – rent of an average apartment (three-room, 70 square meters) – from 450 to 600 DM;

      – food per month for a family of three on average, without visiting restaurants – about 450 DM;

      – utility bill per month – about 150 DM, electricity – 70 DM;

      – petrol (1 liter) – 0.80 DM.

      Our minimum budget, taking into account the cost of renting an apartment, food, clothing and other minor expenses, at that time averaged about DM 1,500 per month.

      But my salary payments do not end there – I mean the calculation of the so-called “vacation pay”.

      Vacation pay, as we all know, is the preservation of wages, which are calculated based on average earnings. But this is in Russia. And in Germany, the calculation is carried out according to a different system. The salary is calculated for all vacation days as the average salary for the period, that’s right. But vacation pay in Europe is not the saved average salary that you are paid in Russia, vacation pay is additional payments to the average salary saved during the vacation, and the amount of vacation pay is the average salary plus a 50% allowance. This is about one and a half times higher than the average earnings over the same period of time. Here it is, decaying capitalism, I thought then.

      The calculation of payments for the holidays is carried out according to exactly the same scheme as the vacation pay: we have two days of rest for the Christmas holidays – we were charged an average salary, and to this amount there was also an additional 50%! It’s ingenious, this is even impossible to imagine in Russia.

      I have worked very intensively in this enterprise. On the second shift, I stayed two hours longer and finished my working day not at 22.00, as it should be according to the schedule, but at 24.00. On Saturday, if my work schedule coincided with the first shift, I went to work for six hours – from 6.00 to 12.00, this was an additional, if desired, working day on Saturday. If I worked the night shift, then I went out on the sixth, additional shift. Sometimes the schedule dropped in such a way that I worked the night shift for three weeks, one after the other, working also the sixth shifts. One day off a week was obtained in this mode of operation – Sunday until evening, since the new week and shift began on Sunday at 20.00. So, I worked so intensively in overtime not because the money was very necessary, but in order to make it physically difficult and not to get used to this type of work and stay here to work forever, or, what was more real, not stay at this level for a long time!

      I used to say to myself very often one phrase that I used in difficult times and during my service in the army: “It does not reach through the head, it will come through the arms and legs.” And my legs got very tired, as I worked standing up the whole shift. But it was hard for me not only physically, but – and even more so – morally. Despite the fact that I had a decent salary, I did not receive complete moral satisfaction from this work. Over the years, my hourly rate in the company, gradually increasing, reached DM 25.00 per hour. Compared to my initial level, the result was 60 percent higher after five years.

      After a year of work, I decided to study at the same time as a welder. Having successfully passed the exams after six months, I received my diploma as a welder and continued to work at the same company, only now in a different area and as a welder. There were three welders in the entire enterprise. I welded everything and by everything: I owned electric welding, gas welding, tungsten-inert welding, cooked with a plasma-welding machine and all types of metals – from high-alloyed alloys to aluminum and stainless steel – and even cast iron. When I worked at night, on the third shift, colleagues from other sites often brought from home all kinds of tools and utensils that I had to repair by welding. These were shovels, cast iron, old barbecues, aluminum containers, and so on.

      A year later, I started writing programs for our CNC machines. At first, these were simple programs, and then I moved on to more complex geometries of parts, and also began to optimize the existing programs. I started doing this because of my activity in the welding area. The fact is that when I studied our plasma welding machine, on which we welded about 80% of all parts, I used methodological materials from publicly available sources, optimized the welding parameters to such an extent that the welding process itself not only accelerated twice, but the quality of welding has improved significantly. As a result, the company’s management decided to purchase a new unit for 600,000 DM to stabilize the process, as the old unit could not cope with the load and was malfunctioning. One employee turned out to be superfluous after the modernization of the process in this department, and I moved to the area of processing parts on CNC milling machines.

      Three years later, I was already working as a programmer for CNC machines. After four years of work, I entered the evening department of a technical school in the neighboring town of Braunschweig for a higher technical education. For four years, I went to class twice a week in the evening and every Saturday from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon.

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