NB. I changed the blog colour scheme again, in case people found the bright letters on dark a bit too hard to read. Is this current setup any better? Please let me know!
Well, what a weird week it's been. Actually, I refer to the past seven days, not the Sunday-to-Saturday.
I started off having three days off in a row, and by the end of it, I only had ONE. =(
I worked Saturday morning, and after only getting about two hours of sleep and working for about nine hours, I was pretty much ready for bed - unfortunately, Saturday night was also the night we had set aside for our second Games Night for the year.
Setting up the LAN was a little more complicated than last time, since we now had four PCs to hook up. One of the guests forgot to bring his network cable, which would have left him a spectator to the proceedings; luckily, we had one to spare, so he wasn't left on the sidelines.
Note to self: look for other games suitable for multi-player than Quake III. Shooting up my friends with heavy artillery is not something that makes me comfortable, even if they are disguised as pop-culture icons and running around a giant house!
I managed to stay up until 5am Sunday morning, when I suddenly remembered that I was incredibly effing tired. I shuffled off to bed and slept for about twelve hours. It is remarkably poor form to sleep through the productive hours of a day, even if it is the weekend. "Never mind," I thought, "I still have Monday and Tuesday free."
Now hang on, it gets better.
I got a phonecall at about 12pm Monday, asking me if so-and-so had got in touch with me about working that afternoon... did they happen to call? No? Would I be able to do it? Especially since absolutely no-one else can do it without somehow violating the law of physics (you know, the one that prevents an object from being in two places at once)? You will? Cool! Be here by 3.30!
"Never mind," I thought, "I still have Tuesday free."
I spent most of Monday night playing Ico, but I started getting sleepy around 4am. It was a reasonably warm night, so I tried to sleep with the fan going on beside me. Sadly, the only air conditioner in this house is in the living room, so I have to make do.
At around 4.30, the fan suddenly turned off. I tried to switch on the light to see what had happened - and when that didn't come on either, I realised that we'd had a blackout! (cue scrabbling around my room with my mobile phone, trying to find a reliable torch)
As it turned out, the power failure only lasted an hour, but it blacked out half the town; a couple of other nearby cities also lost partial power. I spoke to someone about it the next day, who said that it was strange driving through brightly-lit streets, only to enter darkness one street over.
Unfortunately, one of the places affected by the power loss was the shop where I work, and clearly the register did not handle the power failure very well.
The next day, when my co-worker came in to set everything up for the morning, he discovered that the register was completely non-cooperative. Apparently, the register's circuits must have either received a shock or not liked the forced shutdown, since nothing he did could coax life back into the thing. After several calls to the tech support, and in between attempts to actually serve people fuel and whatnot, he and the head office staff managed to scrabble together a workable system; basically, everything had to be done manually, just like in the old days before computers were thrown into the mix.
The problem with doing things manually is that they take a lot longer, and it is far easier to make a mistake. Unfortunately, customers have become used to receiving prompt and efficient service, and as such are no longer content to stand around and wait for paperwork to get filled out. So, in order to not inconvenience the customers too much, it would be necessary to have all the staff on site as possible, to make sure evrything went smoothly.
You know where I'm going with this. Phonecall at 9am: "Ben, you're not going to believe this... can you please come in?"
Of course, I couldn't leave people in the lurch; it would have been far worse NOT to go in. It's just annoying that, of the supposed "three-day weekend" that I had lined up, the only actual day I had free I practically slept through (though I did get to play a bunch of cool games with friends, so it wasn't a total washout).
Here's hoping next week works out a little better!
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2 comments:
The color scheme looks fine!
You're a better person than I am, agreeing to come in.
And I know how those power outages go... That used to happen at Half Price Books when I worked there, and it SUCKED a big horsey cock! We'd have to get out the old manual slide machines to make carbon copies of customers' credit cards. (And of course, no one could ever remember where we'd stored them away the last time we had used them, so that would take forever.) And then when the power finally did come on, we had to enter all those manual slips into the credit card machines. Except inevitably, our cashiers hadn't pushed down hard enough on half the slips to ensure that the credit card numbers transferred to the carbon slips. So long story short, customers got a lot of free books on those days!
Oh yeah, those damn manual vouchers! Luckily our manual swiper worked fine (because it was nearly brand new) so we didn't have that problem. The only issue we had was trying not to lose any sales from the pumps before they reset. We wound up only having four pumps running at the time, so that all the trucks and buses could still fill up.
Oh, and the system's back up and running again. Fortunately, it was only out for the day; they delivered a whole new register for us to use.
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