Tills crash, customers rush in

[Lace Neil Singer]

Oh, and one more time, I don't work for free.

I was working a day shift when we started getting issues with our tills. First of all, the tills just were slower than usual, then they started to freeze for short periods of time. Finally, one by one, they went completely blank screened. After the second one crashed, I had to run out back to tell my colleague Laura who was on the phone to the tech people that we had lost one more till, leaving my colleague Sarah to man the remaining one. It was dead. Sorry, only joking. We were completely slammed with customers, as tho a signal had gone off in every customer within a ten mile radius's brains telling them to all go to the petrol station THIS MINUTE.

I went back out to the shop floor to tell the giant queue of customers that we were having some technical problems and that only one till was working. Most took it well, a few whined about being made late and why couldn't we just fix the tills? Funny how SCs expect us to be completely brain dead, right up to the moment that a till crashes, then we're expected to be technical geniuses who can fix a till in a matter of minutes. One SC bitched at me for about ten minutes about how we were going to make her late to collect her kids from school, and how she wasn't going to be able to do her shopping today and it was all our fault. Really? You saw the giant queue of cars stretching all round the block when you drove up to the petrol station. Why didn't you just drive past instead of joining on the end when you knew you only had a limited time to get petrol and shop?

At this point, Sarah's till started to freeze for short moments. Uh-oh... I went out back to talk to Laura. She'd just gotten off the phone with tech and I told her that Sarah's till was freezing and was likely to crash, and we had about fifty million customers. We decided to call Craig and ask for permission to close now, cuz we didn't know how much longer we had left before the third till decided to crash. I rang Craig and explained the situation while Laura went out to be bitched at by SCs. Craig told us to not authorise any more pumps and to just serve the customers in the shop, and to close off the forecourt, not allowing anyone else in. I went to do this and got sworn at by about three SCs who seemed to think that I had committed a heinous crime by not allowing them into the petrol station. Two of these SCs drove in round the back, and I had to waste a lot of time telling them to go away. The third SC drove thru the tanker bay and I also told him to clear off.

Laura had rung up tech once more and they told her that they would fix the tills as soon as they could. There was still a giant queue to deal with on the one working till, cuz it was taking yet longer to serve customers due to the constant freezing and slowness. At that point, it was the end of my shift so I left. As I walked past the queue, I heard muttering from people who thought that I had no right leaving at the end of my shift, so I ignored them.

Note: As I heard later, the petrol station ended up being closed for around an hour, which was how long it took tech to get the tills back. Sarah and Laura just stacked shelves and cleaned for an hour, occasionally taking a break to use the tannoy to tell people who drove in thru the back to clear off. XD

[An Haddock]

We have a *chain convenience store* across the street and once in a while their registers crash or they get hit by one of our famous power outages due to our aging infrastructure. They actually have to close the store because everything has to be done through their computerized terminals.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but when it fails and cripples your business, it becomes a liability.

Owning a computer store we're subject to similar issues. If my internet access goes down, it severely limits a lot of what we can do. Running OS updates, downloading software, etc. And if the power goes out we're absolutely screwed... but fortunately that usually only happens for a few seconds, not hours.

At least if the internet goes down we can still use the cash register for cash/check transactions... although we're switching over to a new POS system soon which will be all online. Sigh.

[Lace Neil Singer]

We once switched to a new system but ironically, it was worse than the old system. At least the old system works about 80% of the time; the new system had an issue practically every day and we were always closing due to tech being completely incapable of fixing said issues. Eventually, head office let us go back to the old system; 80% capability is still miles better than 10%.

[KellyHabersham]

Owning a computer store we're subject to similar issues. If my internet access goes down, it severely limits a lot of what we can do. Running OS updates, downloading software, etc. And if the power goes out we're absolutely screwed... but fortunately that usually only happens for a few seconds, not hours.

That's about what happens when the Internet and/or power goes out at the library, since so much of what we do now is on computers. It's rare though, that we're allowed to close when this happens.

[Lace Neil Singer]

We're quite lucky in that the managers we have are competant and who realise that it's better to lose a short time in trade while tech fix the problem, than to force us to remain open with one till running and lose loads of customers who take one look at the petrol station with the giant queues and half the pumps closed off, and keep driving.

[Android Kaeli]

At the Warehouse if the power goes out for whatever reason there's a couple of generators that will kick in to let the store run for a while. I was still on the front line when the power went out suddenly, which happens a couple of times a year when someone decides to run into a power line pole and knocks out power to a line of stores. Well one of the generators decided go kaput and not kick in, which resulted in a lot of things not working or going very slow -- like the registers.

We couldn't close since management didn't want to lose any sales, which unfortunately we did because about 75% of the store didn't have power to do anything about. I don't know what the electric company said to get the store closed so they could work on the generator, but whatever it was it worked -- store closed about three hours early. If management had their way we wouldn't have closed at all.