While looking at other blogs I have found that they aren't full recaps of days, more often they are just entertaining bits, so I think I may try this out... it seems to be more 'legit'.

I got up at 4:00 am this morning to go to work, like normal, got to work on time, like normal... then things got less normal. at around 7:00am all hell broke loose. You see, at this restaurant that I work, we use these monitors that display menu items, prices, and handle credit card interaction. They are all neatly packaged into a touch screen that is very simple and easy.

While I was using one of these monitors something strange happened. When I tried to pull up an order that was taken previously, I was given a message stating that there was a "connection error." As I clicked the "okay" button, the screen displayed the proper order and everything seemed to be okay, but as it happened, things were far from okay. I have to mention that this particular monitor was located in the drive through portion of the restaurant, therefor when things lock up, the line gets longer.

Anyway, I went to take the money from the customer, and entered it into the computer, but as I hit the button to open the register, I got another error stating "no available order for recall." it was at this point that I got very nervous. I called to one of my managers and got a key from them to open the register, and get the customer their change, fortunately I can do math, and this was no real big deal.

After the order was done with, we got on the phone with some tech support, I was a little unsettled by the fact that it still wasn't fixed, as I was the one responsible for making sure the customers were taken care of in the drive through. A couple minutes later, two more customers came to order, and unfortunately for me, the register was still being temperamental. As I was trying to get some paper and a pen to keep track of the payments, more and more people were lining up in the drive through.

I called for help and a manager came back and started taking orders while I tried to deal with the money issue, then someone came up with a credit card. Now, remember when I said these monitors handled interaction with credit cards? Yeah, put 2 and 2 together. Not being able to solve this problem, we began giving free meals to the customers who attempted to pay via credit, lucky them.

This whole unfortunate process went on for about an hour, and even after the monitor was fixed, we had to cycle through all the previous orders to get to any current ones, which took about two minutes for each order. During one particular order, the customer got frustrated and drove off, which caused a mix up with the food that was being handed out, which cause more unhappy customers to yell, and on occasion, curse at the ones serving them.

Needless to say, I won't complain about slow mornings at work any more.