The Problems of Power Failure

There was an interesting start to Friday for me. First of all, when I drove into the area where the store is I realised that there were absolutely no traffic lights working. That's the first time I've ever been down that road and not been stopped by at least one red light. Anyway, I didn't think much of it at the time and assumed that there was just a fault with those lights. Then, when I got into work I realised that it was in fact the result of a power failure.

The store was in almost complete darkness as most of the emergency lighting has disappeared due to the refit (still waiting on that ceiling - although the heating/air conditioning is back) and it wasn't all that light outside anyway. Somewhat oddly, however, although there was no power for lighting the televisions in the electrical department were all still on. The photo lab equipment was all still on as well, including the two digital machines. Normally, when there is a power failure, the only things left running are the emergency lights and the checkouts as they are connected to a back-up supply.

The checkouts are supposed to be unaffected by a power failure but in reality that is never the case. At least half of the tills will go offline which basically means they are isloated and therefore can't process payment by cheque, card or sell any phone top-ups. Given 10 minutes or so they will normally come back online by themselves and everything is fine.

As soon as I got down to the photo lab on Friday I was asked to go on a checkout to deal with the ever growing queues of people wanting to leave a pretty dark store. The till I found myself on was and express till (you can read more about my attempts to enforce the no more than 10 items rule here and here) and it was online, which was a bonus and everything was fine for a while. After about 2o minutes the lights came back on but then quickly went off again before once again coming back on. This buggered everything up even more.

Firstly, my till and most of the others in the store went offline, so that's no cards or cheques. The customer I was serving at the time was trying to pay with a card and didn't have the cash to cover the total of the shopping so there was a delay while I waited for someone with more power than myself to sort something out for him. Another problem with being offline is that the till can't store a transaction so I couldn't do that and send him to customer service to get sorted out there. Eventually the transaction was voided and the manager went to find an online till to put it through. All through this the next customer was standing there and able to hear everything which was going on, so what happens when she comes to pay? Yes, she hands over a credit card. Another call to the manager, another voided transaction and an even longer, angrier queue for me to deal with. Marvelous.

After about ten minutes the till came back online but that wasn't the end of the problems. Those tills which had been knocked offline by the blips in the power supply were now displaying the date as 01/01/00 and the time as 00:00. This means that those tills still can't take cards or cheques unless the card number is typed in (and there is a 30 second delay between telling it you want to do this and typing in the number) because the electronic system sends that date and time to the bank which doesn't like that and refuses authorisation. For whatever reason, the loyalty cards also wouldn't register as being used unless the number was typed in manually. Some tills also had problems the special offers and weren't deducting the necessary amount. Presumably this is because the dates are also programmed as well and therefore the system didn't recognise the offers as being valid.

This general chaos lasted another 20 minutes before everything caught up with itself again. After all of that I was glad to get back in the photo lab, at least there's somewhere to hide when it all goes wrong. I have to say though that nobody I encountered was particularly annoyed by the whole thing, or at least if they were they didn't take it out on me.

I thought checkouts was supposed to be less stressful?