Oy Veh - It Never Rains But it Pours - Computer Woes Once Again

The store computer has been acting up, flashing screens up when closing down for the day. But it was still shutting down, just with a lot more hassle. BUT, on Saturday night, it didn't shut down at all, and we couldn't start it up without an immediate error, not allowing us any options. It was time to call my Computer Guru - Dale. On Sunday, I left him a message and he messaged me back later in the day. I'll call him at 7:45 am today, tell him more about what's going on, and then if he thinks he might be able to help, I'll go to the shop, pull the computer CPU, and head up to Dale's house/workshop in a far northern suburb of the Twin Cities. 

There's nothing that gets to me much more than computer 
issues, and I'm the person who's supposed to be able to 
figure all of that out. But it's an antiquated system, 
dating from the early 2000's, and it's got quirks and age. 

At the same time as we're (hopefully) getting our computer repaired yet again, we also started looking into other resources that we could use to operate the shop until we shut down next year. That's turning into something a bit more difficult, but we have a few leads on Point of Sale systems that might work for our particular set-up. The key is that we don't want to spend a lot of money - we're going out of business next year and it makes no sense to spend thousands and thousands (and some of those systems are in the $10,000+ range). We'll be using it for 6 months or so, and need to keep the expense as low as reasonable to get something that will work for our set-up. 

First we get the Black Screen of Death - it's looking 
for a line of code that's corrupted or missing. It's stating 
that we should call our ARBA dealer - that's a bit 
frightening - I don't think that company is even in business 
any more, and they stopped supporting my equipment 
in the early 2000's. 

Add in the fact that the Wild lost both their Friday and their Sunday games - the Sunday game was absolutely pathetic! - well, it wasn't one of the best weekends I've had. It's been two years since I last had to contact Dale about a computer problem with our system. I'm really hoping he can manage to get this one off the DOA list, through Critical Care and into home care. *sigh*. I lay this event totally at the feet of DH. If we had kept to my personal time schedule, we would have already had our "Out of Business" sale and the doors would be locked for good. But NO ... he's dragging his feet, wanting to get rid of the Air Flite aspect of the business - something he should have done at least a decade ago. We're all paying the price for his inability to move forward into unknown territories. 

After the Black Screen of Death, comes the Red Screen of 
Death. This one stays on the screen, and the only way to get 
out of it is to hard-shut the system down. However, when we 
turn the computer on again, we're back to the black screen of 
death, followed by the red screen, and we can't get the system 
up and running at all. We'll see what Dale can do, but this 
may be the end for our old computerized register system. 

Chickie is being a real trooper - coming in to work on her day off so that I can take the computer up to Dale and deal with all of that. It's always a total PITA when we don't have a functional computer - every sale has to be hand-written onto carbonless receipts and entered into the system when we have an operational system once again. If someone is buying a bunch of beads - some on clearance and some not, that can be a LOT of handwriting to do. 

It's not impossible to operate with hand-written invoices, 
but it's a royal PITA and takes a LOT of time. Without our 
computer system, we're dead in the water. Usually Mondays 
aren't super busy, and I'm going to hope that's the case today 
while we're without a sales register. 

So, this will be a day that I probably won't want to remember, except I'll have the chance to catch up with Dale a bit, and that'll be lovely. He's been a great friend over the years, and really, I have no idea what I would have done over the years without his skill and expertise. We get along really well, and he's on my Holiday card list - LOL. So, I'm off to do my crazy day and I'm hoping everything will be fixed and back in operation by the end of the day. *sigh* Have a good Monday, Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל. I'll be back tomorrow.