Multiply 365 Day 97 - I am your retailer God

 

Back on the laptop this evening because I am running a system defrag on the desktop. Been having some issues with it locking up on websites and not moving as fast as it could, hoping this will help with the problem, though I'll be honest, my preferred method would be to go all “Office Space” on it, but while I am sure there would be a brief feeling of relief but I am not sure how good repairs with a baseball bat would actually turn out.

So today was day one of the Ed regime at work. Thankfully he was distracted on a few other side projects, which meant that at least for a day I wasn't getting yelled at. Not that that will not happen, but it just didn't happen yet. And for the time being it would seem that our register system is once again functional. There are still a few glitches in it, but those are bugs that hopefully can be ironed out over time. But the main problems seem to have been worked out. Since I need a good blog entry, it is time to revisit the history of our dreaded cash register system.

Many, many moons ago, men did not populate the earth. The land was full of flora and fauna, and there were animals here and there. It was at this time that the original program for our register system, Ultimate Retailer, was born. As evolution began to take hold, man was first part of that process, but as humans began to procreate, those that did so were called Birthers. Everyone else was a Middle Eastern terrorist.

As Birther begat Birther, and terrorist split like amoebae to create other terrorists, a store was born in downtown Pittsburgh, called Smithfield News. As the store grew in size and business, it was deemed that something better than the abacuses in the back would be needed for counting the monies that flowed freely into the coffers. The first plan was to just hire one of the money counters from the temple, but as things go with the church, he did not want to be paid in cash, but rather in first born sons. A bidding war ensued, but eventually the money counter from the temple was hired by the Catholic Church, who offered him as many first born sons as he could fondle.

With the money counter plan a failure, the issue of finding a way to keep track of the revenues remained. Until that is, a man in a suit said he had the Holy Grail of all that counts monies, Ultimate Retailer. He looked all official and even had business cards with the words SCR Technologies scribbled on them. Of course those words were written in ink, and just below the scribbled out words “Used car salesman”. He even offered to demonstrate his product by pulling out his Commodore 64 and making the screen fill up with an continous line of zeros. When asked how this happened, he exclaimed it was the magic of Go To commands, the most powerful commands in all the English language. And for just a small pittance he could have this program work miracles. The Smithfield people rejoiced, there was dancing in the streets, and there was even rumor of a golden calf involved in the festivities.

Shortly after the annointing of the new system however, things began to seem off. Error messages came where before the magic of zeroes once occurred. Customers began wondering why it was taking longer than in the olden abacus days to simply buy a beverage or a newspaper. So sacrifices were made, chickens slaughtered, incense burned, anything that might bring back the the SCR god. On occasion the SCR God would send a message, usually it was either “You have forsaken me” or “The warranty is only good for 20,000 miles”. But the problems persisted. It got so bad that the abacus salesman would crank call, he wouldn't say anything, he'd just hold up his phone and let everyone hear the sliding of beads back and forth.

While all of this was going on, Donald Trump decided that he wanted to be a Birther too. The only problem to that plan was he couldn't announce he was a Birther until someone admitted actually giving birth to him. Otherwise he was just a amoeba splitting terrorist is sheep's clothing, even if that clothing cost more than most people's homes.

As for Smithfield, all seemed lost. Lines of both Birthers and terrorists got longer as everything pretty much ground to a halt. Machines that originally spit out zeroes, then error messages, now just issued taunts like STFU, when they worked at all which wasn't all that often. They instead formed a union and went on strike, demanding 75% of any transaction they recorded. It got so bad that people from miles around would come and gaze in wonder at the spectacle, rather than actually purchase goods.

Okay, so maybe things didn't go down exactly like this. They actually happened more like this. About 5 years ago the store purchased a new register system, Ultimate Retailer and they purchased it from a local vendor, SCR Technologies. The system was bug riddled almost from day one, and the service that SCR offered in fixing said problems usually amounted to showing up on site, saying everything was perfectly fine, issuing a bill for their time and then leaving, without ever really doing anything at all to fix the problem. The problem was magnified by having people use the software without any idea of what they were actually doing, so now the problem is two fold, the software wasn't being serviced by the people who sold it, and the people who used it had no idea of what they were doing. It was even more complicated because there was never a manual given on how the software was supposed to run in the first place. The problem had gotten so bad that I actually hopped online and looked up the company info for Ultimate Retailer and we just started dealing with them directly, rather than through a third party vendor. Turns out since the software was sold to us there have been three upgrades, none of which SCR ever told us about, and there were mistakes from when they first installed the software anyway. Plus the issue of things not being done properly was also addressed, and hopefully by Monday I will have an actual manual to refer to if I have any questions, and the system will not be brought to a grinding halt any time I go to make a simple price change or delete an item we no longer carry. Yes, it isn't nearly as colorful as the Biblical turn of events I started the story with, and while I certainly stretched the truth in some of the things I said, the registers didn't actually form a union after all, there is still no proof anyone willingly admits to giving birth to Donald Trump.