Servers went down.

[Will-Mun]

So it's two days before Christmas... (last Saturday....duh) and I'm opening, I get there, it's just me and the Third Key, Ron. Everything starts out great. This lasts an hour. This woman comes up, asks for a Gift Card. I go through the process, and she whips out a credit card.

She swipes it once.... doesn't work.

Me: "Uh...Well thats weird, wanna try it again?"

It was weird cause it wasn't declined, it was a message I never seen before. She swipes again, and it goes through. No problem. Now the Gift Card begins to authorize.... and doesn't stop. We sit there for a good five minutes before the card craps out and decides NOT to go through.

Ron comes on over and asks what the problem is, I explain the Gift Card won't authorize. He tells me he'll handle it, and just take care of the other customers. I do, I get through two customers before another gift card comes through.

This time the entire computer crashes before the card even goes in. I have NO idea whats going on, and Ron is getting....frustrated. He's thinking I messed up BAD, and our only two registers are rendered useless. It's not a good situation, we have a good ten customers waiting.


Then, by the grace of whatever Diety you prefer, the Manager comes in, we both explain the situation.

Manager: "Oh yeah, there was a problem last night with the card swipers."

The problem has a reason. So, after we fix the problem (get my register on again and get the poor first woman her seventy something dollars back, cause her Credit card DID go through) we get settled and find out what happened.

The Credit Card system CRASHED. Thats COPERATE, every single Gamestop could not do Credit Cards or Gift cards.


So yeah, I happened to be in the middle of a transaction using both JUST as the servers went down.

[K245five]

Something similar happened to me at a job once. I come into work, evening shift on a register. I find out that the Corporate server is down and has been ALL DAY. Thus, the card readers aren't taking ANY cards at all! No credit, debit, EBT, Access, nothing! Cash and check transactions were okay, becuase they didn't involve the readers.

Unfortunately, about 75% of my transactions that evening involved cards of some sort. The only way to process them was to put them in as cash transactions. Thus, we were constantly having to do phantom "pick-ups" because the registers were showing way larger cash totals than what was actually there.

The poor office lady had a nightmare straightening everything that mess out!

On a somewhat related aside, every Thursday we would have big sales with huge savings. Well, one Thursday the Corporate server for some reason didn't download the prices into our server. So, all the sale items were ringing up regular price, which pissed off plenty of people. Another "fun" day! The cashiers were instructed to handring the sale price of any ad items that came along and keep a copy of the ad with them at all times to help them out.

[simplyanother]

We had the credit card stuff go down at least 4 times this month. But only twice while I was working. Stayed down at least 1 hour each time.

I wanted to ask the other person who works for the same craft storesthat I do if his/hers went down, but it was always about 11 in the morning, and since he/she is on the west coast, and I'm not...well anyway.

At one point we couldn't take credit cards, debit cards or gift cards. You'd have thought we'd stopped taking any form of US currency with the way some people were acting. I think if this would have happened THIS Sunday (Christmas Eve), I might have killed someone. Probably myself.

We are given no warning, except that suddenly, the "processing" thing seems to take forever.

[Will-Mun]

Nobody really had a problem with it when it happened (big shock for me.) And after about...an hour, we were authorized to do Credit over the phone. Another hour, we were authorized to do manual Credit (with the old 70's teal colored credit stamp clamp?)


But until it was fixed hours later, we still couldn't do Gift Cards, and still people had no problem. We apologized, informed they might come up later today, and that we were open tommorow (Christmas Eve). And everyone was fine... cept one woman.

She gave me SUCH a look, just daggers. I apologized, and she just kinda walked me off, completely blowing me off. She stood around for a few moments, looking like she was pouting... I asked her if she needed anything else, she ignored me.


But other than that? Everyone was cool with it.