Register Reboot

[purplecat41877]

Yesterday, I rang up a very large order for a customer and before the payment went through, the register shut itself down and restarted itself. I got both service desk employees to help me out and I moved the next customers into another register and got them on their way.

It turned out that I had to not only rering the order, it had to be split. This customer was buying items to make baskets for people. She and her daughter even moved over to an empty register area so the items could be arranged while the service desk employees and I tried to retrieve her receipt but the order somehow got voided out. The customer even apologized for what happened and one of the service desk employees told her she didn't have to do that.

I mentioned to this service desk employee that the register should be the one apologizing. Of course, it can't do that since it can't talk.

[bean]

One of our registers popped up the infamous Windows blue screen of death yesterday during a transaction.

Our registers don't save anything to the server until the transaction is finalized. So, we moved everything to another register, and tried to reboot that register.

Uh oh... some error about a failure reading the bootable hard drive and could you please insert a floppy? (no floppy drive)

Try again... this time it doesn't even recognize the hard drive in the BIOS.

Did I mention NCR PC-based register PCs are a massive pile of shit? Our registers (NCR RealPOS) are 2 1/2 years old - about 1/2 of them are on their 2nd hard drives (and it looks like the HD crashed in this one), several on their third, a couple on their 4th, and one on its 5th!

We now have 3 registers, out of 20, down, the week of Thanksgiving.

#1 has a scanner that APPEARS to work, but won't scan anything (weighs fine), it's also missing the ribbon for the check printer and the stylus for the card reader. Our accountant has refused to order new ribbons for 3 months now, even though most of our check printers leave a very, very faint impression on checks/coupons now, some of them just leave some barely visible indentions in the paper where the printhead tries to print.

#2 works, but the backlight on the LCD monitor for the customer display burned out. When you turn on that monitor, it works for about 10 seconds, makes an audible crackling noise, and goes blank. You can see "see" the screen if you shine a flashlight at it, but the backlight is gone.

#10 is the one that won't boot at all. It just keeps giving errors about how the hard drive is unreadable.

We only use #1 during the holidays. #2 gets used when other registers are full. #10 is always used.

NCR was out a few days ago. They got the scanner on #1 to power up (they were the ones who disconnected it when we reported it wouldn't scan anything, 4 months ago - they just swapped it with another seldom used scanner and charged their normal site visit fee). They unplugged the VGA and power cables to the customer display on #2 and called it fixed. They were attempting to "fix" something on #10 when it popped up a bluescreen and it hasn't worked since.

I really do like our NCR registers, but holy CRAP does their maintenance suck ass.

Finally, #6 has had a bad VGA cable to the cashier display for over 2 years. If you look at it funny and jiggle it JUST right, it shows up fine. Otherwise everything shows up in green and half the buttons on the cashier keyboard don't work. Even though we've been able to repeat the problem, NCR keeps saying it's nothing with the equipment. Jiggling the cable makes it freak out, shock you, and the display goes to green (25% of the time it bluescreens when you do that too). The scale on #6 is also really weird... about 3/4 of the time when you hit "Scale Zero", the scale starts spouting out (in plain english) multiple errors. "ERROR, LOGIC... BOARD.. FAIL! ERROR, PRIMARY LASER DIODE FAIL! ERROR, SECONDARY LASER DIODE FAIL! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEP! ERROR, COMMUNICATIONS FAIL! ERROR, LOGIC FAIL! ERROR, SCALE CALIBRATION FAIL! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! ERROR!", it usually takes nearly 5 minutes for it to finish talking, and oddly, the BEEP it makes when you scan anything is at a completely different pitch than any other scanners. I just wish I wasn't making this up, I've left out about 2/3 of the crap it actually says.

Fuck NCR.