How I Spent a Night With my Shady Millionair New Uber-Boss and the GAI (traffic militsia)

...Or what happens when two black jeeps collide. In Russia.

Dear Diary,

no no, I'm just kidding.

Ok, so last night, my mum and I were (forced) invited to have dinner at my new boss's place. Now this is a man that I'd spoken to once on the phone shortly before my trip to London, where I stayed at his fabulous penthouse. And even though he wasn't there, he did manage to tell me on the phone (mind you, without ever actually seeing me) that if I quit smoking, I could have the honor of being his lover for a little while. Ooh. He literally said that to me. I'm not exaggerating folks.
To give you all a better picture of what sort of man this might be, just imagine what it takes to become a millionaire in Russia. There is not a single currently legitimate minigarch or oligarch in this country that got that way without at some point being ass-deep in organized crime. There's just no way for this to have happened via legitimate means. Dude owns a bunch of construction companies, this being the real way his money is made, and this one little itty-bitty publishing company that I was hired to work for. Now some of you may naively be thinking that he's a fan of the written word or something, but really, come on. Obviously I now work for a company that basically launders money for either the mob, or just general criminal activity of some sort, such as tax evasion. I'm ok with this.

Sufficed to say, I didn't really feel like going, and was feeling kind of depressed because I had to fucking get up the next morning for my first day of work at his company, and didn't really feel like having a long dinner with the Sopranos.

What happened instead was really refreshing, and also eye opening. Last night taught me that ya can't really be depressed for longer than about 5 minutes in Russia, because then something unexpected will happen to pull your ass right out of it. It might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, it might be a bad thing that happens to someone else and you just find incredibly amusing. I.e. what happened last night.

Uber-boss called me on my cell and told me to meet him downstairs in exactly 6 minutes because that's when he'd be pulling up. Actually, it was more of a command than a telling. My mum was already down there. But as I get downstairs, what I see instead of them waiting, is a black jeep being driven by two Azerbaijanis, plow straight into the back of the much larger black jeep being driven by uber-boss. I kind of hoped at that moment that they might shoot at each other a little bit. Not at me though. I want to live.

But instead, after cursing in their respective languages, these folks got their insurance papers out, exchanged them, and got on their cells with their insurance agencies, and of course, the infamous GAI. At this point, my mum, being the trooper that she is, announced that she has to go pee and left me alone in the jeep with uber-boss as he called his friend, who happens to be the head of GAI (fucking rich criminals), who assured uber-boss that a car would be there in minutes. Then I was forced to talk to this dude for a while. He told me some shit about how ten years ago there actually would have totally been shooting, but now they just exchange papers and isn't progress awesome. I asked him if he used to carry a gun. The answer was an enthusiastic "Yes, always in my pocket. Now I don't so much, because I do not need this." Dude is so hooked up, he doesn't need a gun anymore. Ah, progress.

Then, even though he "just came back from Banya with his GAI boss friend", we sit and wait for 3 hours for GAI to show up. In the meantime, two insurance agents, who look like total mobsters, with leather jackets and shaved heads and all, show up with digital cameras and take pictures of the two busted jeeps. The Azerbaijanis looked slightly scared by the way, because their jeep is obviously way cheaper than ours, i.e. we're more dangerous, and also, they are Azerbaijani, and we're at least Jews, i.e more white and less likely to be beaten by anyone in a uniform.

Uber-boss kept calling his friend and getting angrier and angrier about how long it was taking for the militsia to show up, but then we all calmed down (even though I was starving because I was promised dinner and hadn't eaten as a result) because it turned out that all the GAI were at an accident involving four corpses. We all agreed that our little fender-bender could wait.

Finally, they showed up. Actually, it was just this one, pathetic looking, Detina, who took down every body's info, and then made us drive back to the militsia headquarters for more paperwork, where uber-boss had to bribe him with $100 in order to end the now 4 hour ordeal.

So, this is what happens when two black jeeps collide in Russia in 2008. No shooting.

We did end up going to dude's house after all this was over, but just got fed with some tea because it was like 1 a.m. The funny thing is that his son was supposed to be there, and called him while we were still there to tell him that he himself had gotten picked up by the GAI and didn't have $100 to bribe them with, so he wasn't going to make it home in time to meet me.

Overall, the incident cheered me up as if I had eaten a pound of ice-cream. The best part was that uber-boss kept half-apologizing and then stopping himself because he could see that I was doing a piss-poor job of not grinning from ear to ear and giggling giddily. Then I had to apologize a little bit. The guy turned out to be cool, and came into the publishing company just to check up on me. Also, I didn't notice, but according my my mother, he was hitting on me like crazy. But hey, if I don't notice, then I don't have to respond, and it doesn't actually bother me.

Day 11 ( FIRST DAY OF WORK AND I'VE ALREADY BEEN POISONED)

Oh god, it's my first day of work, and already I'm suffering. What the hell??!!! Why can't I get a break? Well? God? What's up? You wanna fight? What's up?
Seriously though, it's my very first day of work. This job is going to be fairly easy I think, if you don't count the ten pages of translation that they'd like me to get started on sometime in the near future. Other than that, for now, it's just compiling lists of publishers. But non of this matters right now, because I've been poisoned.
Ok, so apparently, here in Russia, non of the older employees wanted to go outside for lunch and blow a ton of their hard-earned cash on lunches bought from over-priced salad bars or sushi restaurants. So they came up with an ingeneous system where they hire somebody's gradma to cook for the entire office. She cooks a 5 motherfucking course meal for 60 RUBLES a day per person. Ok, that's two dollars a day and there's compote and dessert included. This is great. Except that it would appear that our particular Babushka has decided that it aint right that I got my job via the family connection (many people here, judging by their reaction to me, seem to feel the same way), and so has taken it upon herself to avenge the entire office by poisoning my poor weak-stomached ass on my very first day of work.
I swear to god, I'm sitting here right now, hunched over and sweating in pain, unable to do anymore work, barely able to keep from barfing up the beet salad, buckwheat with beef, potato soup with crackers, black currant compote, and apple pancakes all over the place.
I guess it's possible I may have just eaten too much...

P.S.
It is colder than a witch's tit here in the office, and whenever I voice my complaints about it, I am joyfully told "Don't worry. You'll get used to it." What? Screw you people. I'm putting on my fur coat!

P.P.S. more to come later on how I spent my evening with my shady millionaire uber-boss and the GAI (traffic police)