There was a lot of work-related crap going on yesterday that kept me from making a post. I certainly could have taken the time to inform you all of the day to day shit that happens, but as I told my wife about it (and the fact that she and I are rougly 2/3rds of my reading audience) I decided I would just let it go for the day. I suppose there could be a real reason why anyone else would care, but I have no idea who that person is, nor what the person is trying to do with the information.
A few updates, just in case you actually do read the site on a day to day basis. I have solved the cash register problem, the problem being that the memory was full and could not hold any new items, and have made it so that I can upload new items through the handset as usual. That is a bit of a bitter victory though, since that will likely result in having to do a full system purge at some point. By that, I mean that they will ask me to print the PLU list then walk around the store to find the ones that we still carry, then delete the rest. Since the process of taking out a single plu takes a couple of seconds, this could take a very long time. I am getting paid to do it, of course, so it is no sweat off of my nose, but the thing is that I am given just a few seconds per day to work on it, while they expect that I should be able to take care of the whole store in about an hour….or something…Given a full day to work on that alone, I could probably get rid of several thousand items that we no longer carry, which would keep the store operable for the next year at the very least, but I am not given that kind of time.
Much like the old adage says, they want it done yesterday, however, they wanted me to occupy my time in other ways the day before…Like scraping excess wax build-up off of floor tiles. Of course the fact that they wanted me to do that the day before will always slip their minds when they get back into the bitching about why the pc/cash-register communication seems sub-par. I actually asked the Male half of the owners of the store if I could work on the computer for a bit to delete some other items, he said, “not until you have finished all of the jobs that you started in the store”.
Keep in mind, at this point, that I can only add one new item to the register for every item that I have deleted. There is no way that I can add 20 new items to the register when I finally got the damn thing back to exactly even yesterday. I must delete one item in order to add a new item. So, why haven’t I added those fifty items in that little box? Becasue there is no way to do it. I really want to just clear the memory of the registers and start from scratch, because, honestly, they want me to add every single item that they stock, even if that item will never, ever, ever be in the store again. Then they have fun bitching at me about why their ‘bottom of the barrel’ registers just don’t seem to be able to handle all of the crap that they want me to put into it.
The average scale/scaner system today can hold about 4 times what is in our current system. I am not going to say that this particular fact makes our system less effective, but, I am going to say that you should only add the items that you are going to carry on a day-to-day basis.
If you never want to upgrade your system, you should certainly do your best to clean it out. If you are never going to give me five minutes alone with the machine, you should bitch about the fact that you bought bottom-of-the-barrel technology all of those years ago. I only work there, after all, and I do my best to keep their shoddy system working.
I have crap to work with. The company that sold them the POS software is now out of business, the company that owns the software for the register/pc communication won’t even talk to them/me/us, since them/me/us didn’t buy software support.
This is where I am supposed to explain why it is all good. That is not going to happen today. I had nothing to do with the registers reaching their maximum capacity, I have nothing to do with the decision to try to delete items until all is good again, that might all work well in the short term, but in the long term what have you gained when your gain was nothing?