Computers have bad days....

[l F0CUS l]

Being in charge of the front end can get frustrating. There are a number of things that can go wrong.

But when you have all your registers open, and all of the sudden one crashes, and then another's credit machine stops working, and then another one crashes after that, all with in 10 minutes, it gets very frustrating. Especially when they take 6 minutes to reboot and be ready to us again. Does anyone else have this problem at their grocery store?

And when you tell customers that you are having a few computer problems, they look at you like your crazy, that their aren't suppose to every be any computer problems with the supermarket.

Supermarket computers are computers, and they run on windows unfortunately....

[GingerBiscuit]

You run on windows? Luckyyy.
We run on some godawful thing that hasn't been updated since at least the mid eighties. It's not anything anyone can identify. It's green writing on a black screen. All we know is that it's so old the person who originally programmed our computer system is probably dead. Our system predates windows.

And it doesn't work properly.

We'd like a new one now please.

ANyway, it is very irritating when systems crash and custoemrs don't understand that it happens.

[mattm04]

Ours run OS/2. The CPUs can take up to 10min to boot if when we have to restart them or of we loose power. It's usually around 3-4 min. When we loose power it takes a few seconds before the generator starts which causes the computers to go off. The customers get mad that the lights are on but we are still waiting for the registers to come back up. It's not like we caused the snow storm or thunder stiorm that took down some trees.

[tangrid]

Kinda the same

Used to work at Arby's, and had similar problems. They ran a fairly sophisticated older touch-screen program, and it usually wasn't that bad unless it spit code out at you instead of UI. Problem was, the wiring in the place was horrific, and the thing didn't like to reboot in under 30 min (sometimes much more). Try running lunch at a $1.8 mil a year store with no computers, and the only calculator in the store is up front. Had to relay everything by paper, it was awful. Good news was that myself and the other person on Drive were the two most experienced people in the store, but still. Before that I thought that knowing the price before & after tax of every item on the menu was a curse... afterward I was just grateful that I'd survived.

[AnqeiicDemise]

at my call center, our out-dated computer system (its a dos program with icky green font, just to paint you a picture) tends to lag when a lot of owners call in at one given time. Sometimes, it simply crashes.

Well, the program started to lag last night.. I'm helping a guy who has like, seven transactions to do. I'm halfway done, and BAM the stupid program crashes.

And stays crashed longer than usual. I tell him what's going on and I ask if he can call back later as I'm not allowed to call out. Apparantly, I did the wrong thing as he proceeded to rip me a new one, call me stupid and hang up.

Normally, I wouldn't give a hoot, but he got one of the 'how did I do?' surveys in his e-mail and he gave me the LOWEST score possible.


It was out of my hands, you freakin' retard... and it didn't just affect YOU. The whole system was down for an hour. >.<

[GingerBiscuit]

at my call center, our out-dated computer system (its a dos program with icky green font, just to paint you a picture) tends to lag when a lot of owners call in at one given time. Sometimes, it simply crashes.

Sounds like ours. Except ours lags and crashes when we have lots of sales at a given time. The lunchtime rush is FUN. Why, oh WHY don't our respective companies get us new systems?

[AKWalMartCartGuy]

last time our power went out we had an issue with the generator and had to close the store for a couple hours(on a saturday)

[matty]

This story actually happened a few years ago - it's been some time now since I was at this particular company. Anyway, I was an assistant at a store that sold office products/stationery. It was a Saturday and first thing in the morning, as soon as we opened, the registers crashed and were impossible to get back on-line - no manager in the store that day, the company's internal IT department only worked Monday-Friday.

However, the office computer was still working, so it would be possible to scan items there, but not to process sales. So, we grabbed a few carbon paper receipt books off the shelf. The system went like this (three employees in the store, *one* office computer):
1. Serve customers on the floor/answer their questions etc. as normal
2. Bring customers up to registers to make purchases.
3. Run to office to scan items, writing down product code, item amount, tax etc. on receipt.
4. Run back to register, stamp receipt, accept payment (thank you, thank you, for keys to the cash drawers, and credit/debit system separate to the registers!)

Thankfully, the day itself went quite smoothly, only remember one customer who said that he would "have to come back another day" because he needed a "real receipt" (we stamped receipts with company seal, wrote down tax etc - these *were* real receipts, but anyway).

End-of-day closing on the other hand... grrrr. This process normally took all of fifteen minutes. That particular Saturday, it took two of us longer than an hour. Also a bit irritating was that one of the employees on that day (who didn't normally work in that store) left on the dot of closing. Not so bad in itself, but during the day he had decided that instead of actually writing down product codes on the receipts, he would just put *every single* item as the product code for "special order". In the end, I couldn't figure that mess out, and had to leave it, much as I hated to, to the store manager to sort out on Monday (great manager!)

Still, it's kind of weird to think that once, using paper-based systems every day was not at all unusual (I'm 25, by the way, if you were wondering, and can still remember a few small corner stores like this).

[delorean623]

Where I work, we're blessed with a main server and the computers are just terminals, running of our server. That's great...except when the UPS decides it wants to pop up with an error, causing the server to reboot.

It was easily the busiest part of our day, and we had no registers for about 10 minutes due to this. We're only blessed with 6 registers on a good day. One of them I had out of comission at the time, due to a credit card swiper that refused to work. 5 registers, approx 10 people per line.... they were definitely NOT happy with me. Yet I was still able to hold my 22 second avg trans time to get everyone out the door as fast as possible!

FINALLY upper management realized that we needed to order a new UPS....and it sat in our office for about 2 weeks before they did anything with it. UGH!