work + power cuts = spiffing

Today, marks the best day at work, ever, for one simple reason, POWERCUTS!!!!

I arrive at worrk to find the normally well lit up exterior in a shroud of darkness, which i can only describe as an absence of light. And then when i entered the store i found it to be in complete darkness. there was an obvious absence of any electricity in the building (apart from the self service tills, which must have their own internal power stations to keep going). So i wandered in blindly to be handed a torch from my manager and told to hurry to the freezer isle and begin getting all the stuff out of the freezers and into the massive super-freezers. (i can tell you, in this manic process, many a item were damaged as they were thrown into the plastic crates). Now the worst part of the evening happened. At almost the exact moment that we had gotten all of the stuff into the super-freezer, the power was restored, so we had to take all the stuff back out and stack it. Due to this very long process the store didnt open back up again for about an hour.

Once the store was open again, all was well, for about 30 mins, and then another powercut struck! So we had to start doing manual till work (that means with a pen and paper for all you computer geeks who know nothing about what happens away from your computers) which is a very very slow process as you have to look up all the items in a little book for the price and then work them out. So it took me about 10 mins to get 2 of these done (now when you consider that it takes about 2 mins for loads of the same sizes when the system is working, it is a long time), so i just started estimationg how much peoples loads cost (which is much quicker, i.e. instantanious, apart from the paperwork). And then the power came back online so i stopped manual tilling, but the system took another 10 mins to load up (even computers which are branches of supercomputers can be slow).

All in all, this made for what has been my most entertaining day at work yet. And i am thinking that more events like that may have to be "organised" in the future.

that is all.

by memoi, posted on Friday, 12. December 2003 @ 2300.45 gmt