crash

Computers make our lives so much easier. Usually. Until the entire system that your restaurant runs on melts down. Actually, it wasn't the system so much as the hard drive that stores the information for said system. When it melts down on a Thursday, at the end of the night, it causes a headache or two. When it is still down for all of Friday, and you lose out on the entire day's worth of sales, it creates a few more.

After staying until 1:30am while the IT guy comes and replaces the hard drive, I'm left with an entire days worth of cash, debits and credit card payments (all 100 of them laid out nicely on a spread sheet from my friends at merchantlink) to try and guess what people ate two days ago. I can deal with this, as these things happen, and we have the money so it's not such a big deal. And nothing to worry about from Friday, since we were closed all day. A couple hours, and it should be all good.

That is until the computer crashes again. At 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. Luckily, this time, our system was able to run on the backup, so it only caused a few minor hiccups, and a bit of extra work from the servers.

The frustrating part is the IT guy, the one who probably gets paid an obscene amount of money to come on a Friday night at 11pm and install a hard drive, shows up again at 4pm on Saturday, making what is sure to be another huge investment on his obscene paycheque. And then proceed to ignore the fact that the computer tells him the CPU fan is not working. He can see the fan, I can see the fan, and it's not working. The computer does him the courtesy of telling him that it isn't working. Yet for the next 5 hours, tries 42 different ways to fix the problem without making the fan work.

This has now held me up 5 hours from getting Thursday cleaned up, which should have been done and cleared now for some time. Maybe I could have even came home an hour early. Nope, the fan isn't there according to the IT guy. Finally, thank goodness, he stops to look at the nonexistent fan. And, after moving the cord and jiggling it, it worked! Imagine that.

So, reboot the computer, and it doesn't tell us that the fan is broken anymore. And it stops shutting itself down. And all is good in the land of Micros. Amazing. The crappy part, I won't get paid any extra for spending extra time at work. And IT guy, he will probably get double OT for his adventures in White Rock.