Every night at work the closing manager is supposed to run a report that pulls all of that day’s information so the computer work is correct the next day. Well, in the last couple weeks, the register we run those reports on has been acting up and at some point during the night when those reports are being run, the printer jams up. In the past all you would have to do is hit the clear button and the error would go away and the reports would keep on printing. Well, apparently last night that all came to an end. When I got to work today the reports had still not ran. Now mind you, I wasn’t doing books today, I was doing my normal shift so I got there at 8am and the reports hadn’t finished running. I was asked to look at the machine and see if I could get them to run, because apparently I’m good at that or something.
I go up to the office and look at the master register. There is a printer error on the screen and when you hit clear you can see the print head lift up but not quite make it as far as it is supposed to. Much like a 50 year old man reading a Penthouse, it was trying to get it up, but it just couldn’t. Well, I looked at it, and it appeared that the spring that lifted the contraption up wasn’t lifting it far enough up. So I stuck my finger in there and helped it lift and it started printing. I thought hot damn, I fixed the machine. Of course the machine had a different plan altogether. After printing about 10 more lines it decided to stop and throw the stupid printer error code back up. I thought shit, just lift the spring up again and we’ll be back in business. Only problem there was I lifted the spring up the second time and it kind of snapped off the top and hit a part inside of the register. We’ll call that part a “circuit board.” Anyway, the spring hit the circuit board and the other end came off and must have hit something that wasn’t supposed to touch the circuit board and that’s when the sparks flew, followed by the master register going dead. Yes, I killed the master register at work, or so it would seem.
I quickly looked at the situation and turned the master off at the main power switch. Then we get the spring restrung in the spot where it belongs and turn the power back on. Everything looks like it’s up and running because when everything is back up the printer error code comes up again. Well that’s good, because that’s where we were before the sparks flew. Of course when I hit the clear button this time, instead of the gears turning and trying to lift something, it just made a real grinding noise… think an electric pencil sharpener when you shove a pencil in too far and fast. So now we’re sitting there, the bookkeeper needs her reports ran so she can get all of the paperwork done for the day and it makes the drawer balancing easier. At that point I think, hey why not take the printing unit off another register and put it on the master register and then the reports will finish printing and we’ll be back in business.
Just a word of warning… if you’re ever working with outdated NCR equipment and you swap out a printer, don’t forget this little important nugget of information. Turn the damn machine off before you plug the new printer into it. I know that now, unfortunately I did not know that at 9am this morning. So I go over to one of our check lanes and I pull the printer unit off of that register and drag it into the office. I pull the plug on the printer on the master and I put the new printer unit into place and go to plug the unit into the back. I did not turn the unit off first, but when I plugged it in, the unit did shut off. I turned it back on thinking that it would just reset like it did before and with the new printer we’d be good to go. Well, shit doesn’t quite work like that on a Monday. I’d say this was roughly five minutes before the pharmacy informed us that the registers wouldn’t let customers use credit cards.
It was about that time that I realized I was in a little over my head and I wasn’t going to touch anything else. It was time to call the helpless desk. I called in and told them about our master register and then mentioned about the credit card machines not working. Well, that was a mistake because when I went back to the conversation about the master register I was told that the problem with that has been sent to NCR and we weren’t talking about that anymore. Now I was being told that the credit card problems were a separate problem and we were dealing with that.
At the same time as I’m on the phone not getting anywhere, our pricing people are on the phone with another person from the helpless desk because their computers are screwed up too. Well, the person they’re talking to apparently thinks their problem is related to the master register’s problem. After talking to my yahoo for almost an hour the pricing girl comes back and says her yahoo wants to do a master reset on the master register. I mention this to my yahoo and he says… yeah, that might solve your problems. What the fuck? He talks to me over an hour going as far as getting the credit card company people on the line with us and then says the reset might just fix everything… Now that’s fucked up.
After all this we were told that NCR would be coming out to fix our one printer that from my best guess had a fried circuit board. Before hanging up we were told if NCR didn’t show up within the next four hours to call and they would see where they were. This was somewhere around 9:30 am. At 2pm they called back because some of the reports didn’t pull through because of all the problems and they needed to dial in to take them. I mentioned that NCR hadn’t shown up yet and they said there was nothing they could do about it. Luckily they showed up about a half hour later and fixed it and everything was right again.
Fuckin’ Mondays.