Storm Woes

 It's been a good long while since we've had a storm that lasted longer than like...an hour it feels like.

And here we've had a storm that's lasted at least 2 days already. 

Not consistently. There's been off and on sunshine. Off and on thunder/lightning. Off and on rain. 

But like...consistent storms aren't really a thing.

And to have lightning show up in said storm? Totally more rare.

And totally more exciting.

I love a good lightning storm. And love when it comes with rain. It's like the perfect combination to relax.

Which it's hard to relax when you're at work.

But like...there's just a certain energy that comes with storms that totally energizes me. 

In any case.

I was at work.

When yet another surge of weather hit us.

This time Hail.

Pounding so loudly on our roof that it was hard to hear anything else but the storm.

It was great! Watching the hail fall to the ground was fun as I don't see it that often.

And my coworkers and I were excited for it.

Until the power flickered.

Then went out for five seconds.

Then we all groaned in unison.

Because the brief power outage...caused our registers to go down.

And the poor things are ancient enough that even a flicker in the power will send them into hysterics...and usually means that it takes us a good 20 minutes or so with at least 3 restarts before we can get our registers back online.

Which means that in that time frame we can't sell anything.

Which means in that time frame we have customers standing there....waiting to buy things....

Luckily this outage happened during a slow period of the day. Where we only had maybe a dozen customers in the store.

A benefit of school starting back up this week....we've had fewer customers shopping during school hours. 

In any case.

We gave everyone the heads up that registers were down and we were working as quickly as possible to get them back up. 

I don't think we had anyone walk out this time...but who knows for sure. There's always one or two people that decide it's not worth it to wait and leave their stuff and go.

And it was a tense 15-20 minutes while we waited for our ancient system to reboot.

It took my register 3 tries to restart before I finally got it online.

But by the end we had all 3 registers up and running and we quickly moved through the fifteen or so customers waiting to check out.

Ended up giving them discounts off their purchases for their patience in waiting which made basically everyone happy and helped to perk up the grumpy customers who didn't like waiting. 

So yah.

Love the storm.

Hate it when it messes with the power at work. 

Until you next find these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi