I mentioned to my Head Manager earlier today that I'd been wondering what we would have done if the power hadn't turned on before we closed for the night yesterday.
-Which again, luckily they got it fixed a couple of hours after the power went out. So there was no concerns there.
But like. It was a question in the back of my mind of what we'd do if we couldn't properly close down the tills and such for the night. Like would we have to do all the 'closing' stuff in the morning? Would we just pretend that the day of the power outage and the day after were the same day and just combine both of the totals together for one deposit? Would the computers reset things in such a way that we'd have no idea how much money belonged where?
It was a ton of questions without a lot of answers.
After all, with power outages we usually only have to deal with a brief flicker period. Maybe half an hour at the most. It's rare to have longer outages. And like if they occur they occur well before we close.
So it wasn't really a concern for us, though it was a thought probably in the back of my Head Manager's mind what to do if that did become an issue.
...
...
...
I halfway wonder if I jinxed us by speaking my concerns outloud.
Because tonight.
An hour and a half before we closed for the night.
The Group Work Chat lights up with a message from the Closing Manager.
"The Lights are Flickering and Registers are Down."
Once again.
The city was experiencing a power outage.
But it was the weirdest power outage as this time it didn't send everything dark.
I mean, I wasn't there to see it in person. I was safe at home, far away from the chaos."
But it was like....only half the power wasn't working? I don't know what that meant for traffic lights and such.
But like in the store a list of issues were:
Half the overhead lights were on.
None of the Offices had lights.
Some of the Fish Tank lights were flickering.
The second set of automatic doors kept opening and shutting even though no one was by them.
1 Fridge out of 4 Fridge/Freezers in the same aisle wasn't working while the other 3 were working just fine.
Our printer wasn't working.
But the Computers were.
The charging station for our work phones wasn't working.
But the Ipads were charging just fine.
The lights for the other animal enclosures were off.
Registers were off.
So like....half the store wasn't working properly.
I can only imagine what the customers were thinking at the time as we apparently had 10-15 people in the store at the time of the outage.
Which wasn't a lot thankfully. I can't imagine the crazy that would have occured if we'd been in the middle of a rush or something with a good 30-40 people in the store.
But it sounds like we ended up ushering the customers out, taking notes and numbers and holding their purchases off to the side for us to contact them tomorrow to come get (and probably give them a discount for the inconvience.)
And I can only imagine how my manager and my closing people were feeling hanging out in a half working building for the remaining hour or so before we officially closed for the night. Hoping that the issue would be fixed before they had to leave.
-It wasn't. Not fully.
But it basically brought my earlier questions up to the front.
How do we close the tills? How do we do the counting of the money?
Like. Good news is the computers were still working so we could count the money.
Badish news was that....it was a bit of a trial getting the tills out of the registers.
As they were completely off so we couldn't really use our regular manager keys and codes to shut it down and get the tills out.
No. Apparently. Somewhere. There's a Register Key. One that will manually open up the registers without having to input data into the computer to do so.
Only we couldn't find it.
Honestly. I have no idea where it would be or when it would have vanished.
As to my knowledge....we haven't needed to ever use this 'register key' to close down a till.
Admittedly I wasn't as aware of things in the beginning years here. So those managers at the time may have had to deal with late night power outages.
But nothing comes to mind in the last decade of a situation where we would have needed the key.
And the places we thought said key would be....it wasn't.
So like...my poor closing manager was probably wondering if they'd have to stay in the store until the power came fully back on or if we'd just have to leave the money in the registers for the night or what.
BUT.
I had the brilliant idea to have the closing manager call our Sister Store.
As they would more than likely have a Register Key that we could borrow to see if it would work for our registers or not.
Which they did have the key! Woot! So my Head Manager drove over to the sister store to grab it then came to our store to give it to the closing manager to test on the registers.
And it worked!!!
Which was really lucky for us because I don't know what we would have done if we couldn't track down a key to get the registers open or if the power didn't turn on....because estimates for getting the power fixed went from midnight to 5am. So like...not a good sign. Though it does appeared to have been resolved now nearly 5 hours after it first went wonky.
*fingers crossed* That we don't have another power issue tomorrow.
Because like once isn't fun. Twice is annoying. Three times? It would be rather ridiculous. *shakes heads*
Here's hoping.
Until you next find these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!
-Sarnic Dirchi
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