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  • The Possessed Register

    I was working in Customer Service this afternoon when I rang through a customer that used a Visa. The Visa was chipped, so he slid it into the machine and typed his PIN.
    Once that was done and his receipt printed off I pressed the buttons for a duplicate receipt to print to put with my paperwork. The duplicate printed just fine but then the register decided to go crazy and just kept printing them!

    It was duplicate after duplicate after duplicate...etc. By the time I finally managed to get the damn thing to stop (or maybe it just decided to stop on its own) at least a dozen receipts had printed off, not including the one I needed!

    I just stared at the register for a few seconds after that, wondering what the hell had just happened. Luckily, the register didn't freak out on me anymore after that and the rest of my transactions went normally.

    When B (the head cashier) came back from her break I told her what had happened and she told me that it had happened to her as well sometime last week, and probably had to do with the fact that I had just changed the receipt paper shortly before that guy came up to my till.
    When the register had gone berserk on her it was after changing the paper, which is why she thinks that might be the reason.

    All I know is that if it happens again, I'm calling for an exorcist.
    my favourite author is neil gaiman. - me
    it is? I don't like potatoes much. - the chatbot I was talking to

  • #2
    I remember something similar happening at my previous job.

    Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with EAS gates, but they're the gates set at the entrance and exit of most stores, designed to detect any "stolen" merchandise. They can also be set off by rental DVDs and library barcodes (had both happen).

    Well, for a period of time, when we were doing the green bag changeover, people would bring in the bags from *rival* supermarket. For some reason, the bag tags had one of the stickers that is NORMALLY deactivated when swiped (they've stopped doing this). Even though they had been deactivated, after a while, they would STILL set off the EAS gates, causing the employee to panic and check every bag until they found it

    Then we had the gate that would beep EVERY time a customer walked through, even if they weren't stealing something! Then it would occasionally beep when there was nobody there. Nothing was blocking the gate, nobody had left a stray tag floating around or stuck anything on it. Very strange.

    Then we had the gate that would beep every 15 seconds. And like the previous one, there was nothing there that could've triggered it off.

    Both times I kept pretending to "excorize" the gate in front of customers, who found it hilarious.
    The best professors are mad scientists! -Zoom

    Now queen of USSR-Land...

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    • #3
      Stories like this always remind me of the time in home ec when a sewing machine just randomly started in the middle of class. Teacher goes to unplug it and it stopped. Walking away the machine started up again. So one of the guys unplugs it and we go about the rest of class. The next day one of the irons just started steaming, thankfully it was sitting up. The teacher looked perplexed as it seemed to only be our class. Every time after that when we walked in everything was unplugged.

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      • #4
        Quoth fireheart View Post
        Both times I kept pretending to "excorize" the gate in front of customers, who found it hilarious.
        I've done that, to the EAS pedestals at the wholesale club, especially after we 'upgraded' them, and they were going off for EVERYTHING.
        PWNADE(TM) - Serve up a glass today! | PWNZER - An act of pwnage so awesome, it's like the victim got hit by a tank.

        There are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I choose to walk!

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        • #5
          Gotta love the perversity of the inanimate. Reminds me of my uneasy relationship with Xerox office machines. I get along well with machines, usually. Canon, Ricoh, Brother, it's all good. But if I get near a Xerox it turns into a possessed thing. Worked with one once that decided to start eating paper. Out of nowhere it would start accordionating sheets coming out and make a right mess that I'd have to clear out. When it got bad, I'd call the service centre and they'd come out and it would be acting perfectly normal and the techs couldn't find a thing wrong with it.

          Got to the point where it would act up and all I'd have to do is walk into the room and announce that I was calling for service *again* and it would suddenly stop misbehaving.

          Yes, I tend to anthropomorphize mechanical/electronic things, but I have decades of experience telling me that there's something to my belief that the machines we make are to a degree self-aware, and since we made them, they're just like us. Machines can be right arseholes if they decide they don't like you, and act perfectly lovely to other people right in front of you.

          Tell me I'm wrong, I dare you.
          What colour is the sky in your world and how high of a dosage do you need before it turns back to blue? --Gravekeeper

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          • #6
            Back at the fast food place I worked at, there were several "haunted Register" happenings.

            You know register tape, I assume, how curly it is? Several times, always late at night, one of the registers would start printing out the receipt paper. Straight up, as though something was pulling it up. I watched the tape of it once, from a printer that was about waist height, the paper went straight up to the ceiling. Once it touched the ceiling, it just fell as though whatever had held it just let go.

            It was creepy.

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