wherein Liz has a long day at work and consequently babbles a lot

I survived work today. \o/ I got a bunch of paperwork sorted out; I sent in two gift certificates for refund checks; I cleaned out November's journal tapes, lottery records, and cigarette inventory sheets; I did two maintenance tasks; and I stood at the counter, manned my register, and was friendly and helpful to customers. Go me!

In addition to all the above, today was the day of deliveries: Coca-Cola, Melitta (coffee filters -- which we could not price or put up, because they send the invoice separately by mail and it never arrives at the same time as the packages, grr), J&R Santa Clara (cigars), and Phillips & King (assorted tobacco stuff). Amazingly, there was only one error in any of the orders -- P&K sent us the wrong electronic cigarette cartomizers -- and between me, BW, and RE, we got everything checked in, priced, and put away at reasonable speed and in fairly good order. Meanwhile JM and I wrote up an order for tomorrow's Elmira delivery, which, thank goodness, I will not be there to deal with. I also expect the Gesty delivery (tobacco accessories) to arrive tomorrow, probably at the most inconvenient time, and I'm glad I won't have to deal with that either.

This week we have had a lot of customers win several hundred dollars at a go on various lottery games. Since anything under $600 can be paid in cash by any lottery outlet (provided said outlet has the cash, of course), that means our deposits have been absurdly low and we had to hold onto one for almost two days, because it was the only one large enough to keep shifting money in and out of so we could keep bills smaller than twenties in the store.

The New York lottery is such a weird business. It also has a horrible profit margin for stores that carry tickets -- only 6 cents on the dollar. That's worse than any other category. Even newspapers, after their decade-long freefall, still average somewhere between 8 and 12 percent margins for retailers. But then, profit margins are always funny. There are some things we sell pretty stripped to the bone, while others we pad out a bit to make up for losses elsewhere. And I freely admit that when we get deals from our distributors, we tend not to pass them on to customers directly; having things go up and down and up and down gets too confusing. What we do instead is sit on prices for a while as our costs rise -- we swallowed two cost increases in coffee beans before we finally increased our retail price, for example, because coffee started with a good profit margin.

...

I do like working in a small local store much more than I think I would like working in a big box store. For one thing, there is much less division of labor. I am officially a clerk, but I am also cleaning staff, and office staff, and 'warehouse' staff, and a person responsible for tracking inventory and placing orders, and so on and so forth. We all have a fair amount of autonomy, since PM generally figures that once we're trained we know what we're doing.

But I am rambling, so I think I will sign off the library computer and head home, buying some kind of takeout dinner en route. Mmmm, takeout. Food I do not have to prepare myself is always welcome. :-)

when badly thought-out programming attacks! news at 9

My local public library, as many libraries do (and bless them for it), provides limited free internet service. In the case of the Tompkins County Public Library, you have to have a library card to get online, because they use a program to boot users off the computer after 65 minutes and make sure each person can only get 65 minutes each day. This is because there are almost always more people who want to get online than there are available computers, particularly between 10am and 5pm.

I guess people were gaming the system by entering random card numbers to get more time, because sometime in the last month, the library has added a new security layer. Now you need your card number AND your account password to log on to a computer with internet access.

Which would be fine, except for one tiny problem.

The default password that the system assigns to people when they get library cards (and therefore library accounts) is the last four digits of your phone number. It is possible to change this password to something that is A) longer, B) less freaking obvious to anyone who reads the basic public blurbs that are all over the sign-in pages, and C) easier to remember.

The thing is, the new log-on program that lets people use the library's free internet stations only accepts passwords that are four characters long. If you try to enter a fifth character, it will not register. No little asterisk appears on the screen.

Whoever wrote the authenticator program either did not know or completely ignored the inconvenient fact that library members can (and do!) change their passwords to something other than the four-digit phone code. I can tell this not just because of the character limits, but because the authenticator window referred to the password as a PIN.

I did not have anything attached to my library account that could be mistaken for a PIN anymore; I had changed it to a proper password years ago. And therefore I could not get online, as my habitual password is significantly longer than four characters.

I complained to a librarian at the reference desk (they referee the internet computer stations), who sent me to the circulation desk. At the circulation desk, I got a second librarian to pull up my account and reset my password to the tail end of my phone number, but it took a bit of back-and-forth before I could get her to realize what my problem even was. In retrospect, I could probably have changed my password myself on one of the card catalogue computer stations -- you have to be able to log in on those, in order to place hold requests and renew books -- but this way the issue has been reported to two librarians. Hopefully one or the other of them will report it to whoever does the programming, and it will get fixed before it trips up too many other people.