Ever had dreams that you’d wish would come true someday? One of my reoccurring dreams over the past few years was that one day I’d be working at the grocery store and everything stopped working. We would have to close the store and get a few extra days off until the problem is resolved. Not the most exciting hopeful dream but for whatever reason it’s something I’ve been longing.
Well last night around 8 PM, all of the registers stopped working. They just shut down. We tried restarting our registers and nothing. We called our tech support and they couldn’t come up with a solution and told us they would call us back. Call us back!? There’s like 35 people waiting in line with cartful of groceries!
We had to act quick because the customers were getting very anxious. So I made an announcement on the intercom…
Attention shoppers, all of our registers are down and we are unable to do any transactions. We are working towards a solution. Sorry for the inconvenience.
A customer comes up to the customer service booth with a dog toy and said he was in a hurry and that he needed to buy it. We told him we can’t ring anything up but he said he really needed it and tore off the scan bar and gave us cash for it.
5 minutes go by and tech support hasn’t called us back. So I made another announcement…
Attention shoppers, we appreciate your patience but we do not know when the registers will be up and running. Thank you for waiting but if you cannot uh sorry.
My manager who was by me said, Maybe you should have written that down. Would have been a lot smoother.
Customers started leaving their cartful of items and walking out the door. Customers waiting at the pharmacy were unable to get their prescriptions filled. We turned away customers entering the store. This wasn’t what I envisioned but it was soon becoming a reality.
Checker’s Christopher and Andy were ready to go home as I can see with the grin on their faces and poor courtesy clerk Johnny J was shaking his head. Shaking his head because he just inherited the job of putting the cartful of groceries back to the shelves.
Finally tech support calls back and they told me to check the connections with our servers in the office. Everything seemed fine until I noticed something unplugged. I plugged the connection back in and BAM! Everything started working again.
The grins of Christopher and Andy were turned upside down. Thanks for plugging it back in!
They must have had the same dreams I’ve had. We ended up closing the store at regular hours which is midnight. Last I saw Johhny J, he was still putting groceries back to the shelves.



