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edenfallingThe smoke shop is a cash only business. Our owner does not like credit card transaction fees, and therefore neither bought the card-reading machinery nor set up agreements with any card-issuing companies. Instead, we have an ATM in the back of the store. The ATM is also, incidentally, the only CFCU Credit Union ATM in all of downtown Ithaca.
It broke today.
From roughly 12:15 to 3pm, the machinery that spits out money ran and ran and ran, endlessly whirring, without ever producing any cash. The monitor screen had also gone blank, so there was no way to tell if the computer that runs the machine was even on.
We called CFCU and they did eventually send an ATM restocker out to look at the beast. She turned it off, since, as she said, "It smelled like something was going to explode," but was unable to fix the problem despite spending nearly an hour on the phone with technical support.
So CFCU sent a technician. He arrived around 6:30pm, and he and the restocker (because she had the keys) spent the next hour and a half pulling the ATM apart, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and how to fix it. They did eventually get it working again... except for the monitor screen, which is still broken and needs to be replaced.
The technician is theoretically coming back Thursday morning to fix that.
...
Meanwhile, I had a book shipment to deal with. Instead of arriving in plastic totes, it arrived in five cardboard boxes. That was annoying, but not in and of intself insurmountable. The problem is that some titles were split between boxes -- say, three copies of Placeholder Title in box 2 and one copy in box 3 -- while at least eight other titles were in fact missing one or two copies, or were not sent at all. And because they were packed with no regard to the order in which they were listed on the invoice, I couldn't tell what was missing until I'd unpacked and sorted the entire damn shipment, which made the process take at least half again as long as it should have.
There are days I strongly dislike STNC's warehouse division. This is one of them.
And then! Then BW, when taking rolling tobacco out of the 1lb bags we buy it in and putting it into smaller Ziploc bags for retail (because most customers like to buy a little bit at a time for under $3 a bag instead of buying in bulk), did not completely seal the bags. Therefore, when I tried to take them out of the storage drawer to put them on the shelf for sale, a couple burst open, spilled loose tobacco all over the drawer, and had to be reweighed and repriced. He does this all the time. I have told him and asked him and even yelled at him to seal the bags -- that is what Ziploc is for, for god's sake -- and he never, ever, ever listens and learns.
I know he is having life issues right now, that his roof is falling apart (though I have less sympathy there because he tried to fix it himself on the cheap instead of getting it done professionally like he should have), and that he is getting old and probably has eyesight issues he doesn't want to admit to, but seriously. When I tell him something like that, I am not doing it for my amusement. I am telling him to fix a bad habit because he is doing it wrong.
...
I am getting more and more fed up with him. So is MS (though that is not new; she's hated him for years now, because he is a male chauvinist ageist dickwad who won't listen to her -- you see, she's a young woman and he's a middle-aged man, so clearly he knows better about everything *sour face*), and so, more to the point, is PM. Except firing him would be awkward because PM knows him socially, and also, he is having life issues, his girlfriend has chronic health problems, and this is a bad time to lose a job.
Still. Working with BW is not good for the health or peace of mind of pretty much anyone but RE (and that is because when BW and RE work together, they don't actually work -- they just stand around talking), and I am so very, very tired of dealing with him three or four days every week, and fixing his errors even on days when he's not there in person.
It broke today.
From roughly 12:15 to 3pm, the machinery that spits out money ran and ran and ran, endlessly whirring, without ever producing any cash. The monitor screen had also gone blank, so there was no way to tell if the computer that runs the machine was even on.
We called CFCU and they did eventually send an ATM restocker out to look at the beast. She turned it off, since, as she said, "It smelled like something was going to explode," but was unable to fix the problem despite spending nearly an hour on the phone with technical support.
So CFCU sent a technician. He arrived around 6:30pm, and he and the restocker (because she had the keys) spent the next hour and a half pulling the ATM apart, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and how to fix it. They did eventually get it working again... except for the monitor screen, which is still broken and needs to be replaced.
The technician is theoretically coming back Thursday morning to fix that.
...
Meanwhile, I had a book shipment to deal with. Instead of arriving in plastic totes, it arrived in five cardboard boxes. That was annoying, but not in and of intself insurmountable. The problem is that some titles were split between boxes -- say, three copies of Placeholder Title in box 2 and one copy in box 3 -- while at least eight other titles were in fact missing one or two copies, or were not sent at all. And because they were packed with no regard to the order in which they were listed on the invoice, I couldn't tell what was missing until I'd unpacked and sorted the entire damn shipment, which made the process take at least half again as long as it should have.
There are days I strongly dislike STNC's warehouse division. This is one of them.
And then! Then BW, when taking rolling tobacco out of the 1lb bags we buy it in and putting it into smaller Ziploc bags for retail (because most customers like to buy a little bit at a time for under $3 a bag instead of buying in bulk), did not completely seal the bags. Therefore, when I tried to take them out of the storage drawer to put them on the shelf for sale, a couple burst open, spilled loose tobacco all over the drawer, and had to be reweighed and repriced. He does this all the time. I have told him and asked him and even yelled at him to seal the bags -- that is what Ziploc is for, for god's sake -- and he never, ever, ever listens and learns.
I know he is having life issues right now, that his roof is falling apart (though I have less sympathy there because he tried to fix it himself on the cheap instead of getting it done professionally like he should have), and that he is getting old and probably has eyesight issues he doesn't want to admit to, but seriously. When I tell him something like that, I am not doing it for my amusement. I am telling him to fix a bad habit because he is doing it wrong.
...
I am getting more and more fed up with him. So is MS (though that is not new; she's hated him for years now, because he is a male chauvinist ageist dickwad who won't listen to her -- you see, she's a young woman and he's a middle-aged man, so clearly he knows better about everything *sour face*), and so, more to the point, is PM. Except firing him would be awkward because PM knows him socially, and also, he is having life issues, his girlfriend has chronic health problems, and this is a bad time to lose a job.
Still. Working with BW is not good for the health or peace of mind of pretty much anyone but RE (and that is because when BW and RE work together, they don't actually work -- they just stand around talking), and I am so very, very tired of dealing with him three or four days every week, and fixing his errors even on days when he's not there in person.
