Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Meltdowns

Today the temperature is hovering right around 40 degrees. That's nice, for January. The snow starts to melt, the roofs clear, the ice dams disappear (I hope) and the pavement loses its icy patches where the trees next to the road cast their shade. All in all, a good thing.

What's not a good thing is the other meltdown I experienced today. No, not my computer - worse. It was the main computer at Wal-Mart. I went in there this morning and half way through the shopping part of the trip someone announced over the intercom that the front registers were having problems. By the time I finished gathering what I wanted, all the registers were down and people were waiting in line for them to come back up. I didn't have much, so I went to the self checkout area and waited. And waited. And WAITED. By this time the computer system had been down for over an hour. I figured, if I'm gonna sit here and wait, I may as well amuse myself. So I told jokes to the clerks and the patient customers: "It sounds like Wal-Mart has a bug in its system. With my luck its either a spider or a cockroach, the bugs I hate most." That got a laugh. So did "One of the side disadvantages to waiting this long is you forget where you parked." When I ran out of jokes (which didn't take long) I called my Mom on my cell phone and chatted with her for 15 minutes. (Thanks, Mom!) Then I called my husband the computer genius to see if he'd heard any corporate chatter about someone hacking into the Wal-Mart system and shutting it down. He said he hadn't heard anything, bu he said it probably wouldn't be too difficult for someone to hack that system, since it's so large and covers the entire country. We'd heard that the other Wal-Mart in town wasn't affected, but oh well. Carl said he'd keep his ears open and he'd let me know if he heard anything.

So after about 40 minutes, a voice came over the intercom again and announced, for the bizillionth time, that the store was experiencing technical difficulties and they were working to solve the problem as fast as they could. I know the management team was on the phone to the home office in Arkansas, but after 40 minutes, I'd had enough. I told the very nice clerk (who'd been handing out free cookies) that I was sorry, but I couldn't stay anymore. She was understanding and I know she felt worse than I did about my leaving, but I needed to get home and get back to work. She told me to leave my cart and their staff would put my stuff away, so I left and went a block down the road to Target and got what I wanted there.

So now I'm home, but am I working? Nooooo. I'm blogging! So I guess I better get back to work. The laundry can't wash itself, you know!

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