Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Grace under pressure

The brief electrical outage at the Kennett Giant on April 14 provided a little something out of the ordinary for those of us who spend so much time in the U-Scan line that we know by heart the four-digit PLU codes of all our fruits and vegetables. I was just about to finish scanning my order when the lights went out throughout the store, leaving darkness and beeping noises from all the computers.
One of the management types sprang into action, warning the clerks not to hit any keys on their terminals. After the system powered back on after a few minutes, he started multitasking calmly, answering clerks' questions, keying data in manually and apologizing profusely to customers. One woman had tried to pay with her debit card four times before the payment went through, and he reassured her that she wouldn't be overcharged.
I'm not sure what the power outage was all about: it was a perfectly nice, if windy, day.

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