What’s the collective for a group of Tills? How about a spaghetti? or a bird snest(sic)?We recently had the sheer joy of assembling, installing and testing twenty customer tills at the same time. These will initially feed back into our client’s existing Movex system and Sage200. Our board room was turned into a mixture of Mission Control and the aftermath of an explosion in a computer jumble sale. Hopefully they will be boxed and shipped out this week and we can have our posh room back.
Twenty new stores, tills, broadband, new sets of remote users – I think our help desk is in for interesting times :)
The spooky thing was I had to go with one of my girls (the dragonnettes) on Sunday to a large (well known) hardware store. She really needed a garden pond pump, but had discovered they were selling off bankrupt stocks of bedroom furniture. We appeared there before 10am – itself unusual on a Sunday – with two cars, and were advised that the “right” men only arrive at around 10:30, although there seemed to be a large number of un-right ones. We milled around with a few other customers hoping the store still had enough of the correct items.
Eventually one of the right men did turn-in, and luckily all the bits my dragonette wanted were in stock, so we were given a list to go and pay before he could ask other men (who still hadn’t arrived) to pick the goods.
We went to the store tills where even more people were shuffling and muttering – ALL the tills were down. I suggested they reboot the router and am sure I would have got a more positive response if I had asked to boot or fondle one of their Sunday staff whilst I was waiting.
The “shift manager” was at Customer Service explaining that she was “away” on the day they had their training on the new system and hadn’t a clue. Eventually the tills came up well after 11:00 and we were able to get served and off. It is surprising how many people were prepared to stand and wait rather than stomp off elsewhere.
I now have 7 days to build a lot of flat-pack furniture and list any missing / damaged items – which is a bit of a worry. I'm really hoping our twenty-store rollout goes much smoother.
-Bill
