The story is not as improbable as it sounds at first. To be clear, he was not a coal miner, but an electrician in a coal mine. He said he started work at 6am, b

The story is not as improbable as it sounds at first. To be clear, he was not a coal miner, but an electrician in a coal mine. He said he started work at 6am, but ended at 1pm. This is not too bad actually. In communist Romania, miners were actually one of the envied professions: high salaries and bonuses, feeling of camaraderie, celebrated as heroes of communism, early retirement (with a relatively large lump sum in the end). Mining was of course very dangerous and demanding work, but as an electrician in a mine, one would get most of the benefits without most of the dangers. Electrician's workshops, as any workshop during communism, really, were hotbeds of what we would call today hacking. With low quality equipment but plenty of raw material, people would use their inventiveness to produce whatever the work required and whatever they or their extended families could use at home. Also they would fix tv's, radios, make antennas, etc. The mindset formed in this way is not too far from a programmer's mindset. (Remember, that at the time, there weren't too many programmers, even in the West.) Also, I've seen some very elaborate devices for grilling steaks and sausages (still in operation today) that people made in their free time at work some 30 years ago in some machine factory. As the communist economy was tanking, people could pretty much do whatever they wanted at work. Some people developed skills they could later use after the change of regime, others turned to alcohol out of boredom, some did both. Just to add some background... Otherwise very nice story and kudos to Mircea. ADD: With the risk of idealising communism, there is another benefit many people got from it, and that is a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. Seeing all the mechanisms of state propaganda, many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising, political campaigns, media, etc. The dark side is that a significant portion of that generation have become conspiracy theorists.