When a user starts unplugging things
If you read the title you might know where this is going. I am in no way IT, I’m just sort of out retail stores IT liaison that talks to the reps because the owner is one of those stubborn yelling users.
On to the story, I walk in to pick up cash for a bank deposit and people are losing their shit. I say the dreadful words “what’s up”. Turns out we had a lightning strike that took out our internet for a few hours, no biggie, $InternetCompany came within an hour and fixed it but now the debit machines won’t communicate with the PeiceOfShit (POS) system that on a good day is riddled with bugs nobody wants to fix.
sigh
I walk over ping the debit machine and it’s working, sweet debit is fine so why are these 2 machines not talking to each other.
Now for the fun part. The blame game.
Introducing:
$HeroPOS from the POS company
And…
$Idiottech an acronym of the name for the less than helpful debit company
First I call up $HeroPOS and they confirmed our owner called them but only told them our debits were down but 1 had been communicating before (hint 1). I tell them both are down now as they are and we troubleshoot but they can’t find anything on their end so they send me to $IdiotTech who based on their name were less than helpful. 760
They asked me to ping the machine which worked then said “we don’t know what else it could be because your machine is semi integrated ask $HeroPOS” I even asked them I see on my screen the connection is set to RS232 what does that mean and could that be an issue. Nope. Fine, I’ll ask the people trying to help.
Call $HeroPOS mention $IdiotTech were less than helpful and mention the RS232 thing. They ended up reaching out to their debit specialist, at this point I gotta go so the next details are blurry. I return for my actual shift and lo and behold “The USER is actually wrong”.
Turns out the machines wouldn’t talk because the owner unplugged EVERYTHING on the debit machine, so while the Ethernet and power cables were correct it didn’t clue in that she moved the RS232 cable in both machines to phone in, which happened to be the same size hole.
And this is why I hate having people messing with things they know very little about.
TL;DR: Owner repeatedly plugged and unplugged the debit machines, wires got crossed, people got confused, pandemonium ensued. Cable ended up going in the wrong hole. 648