A coffeehouse without music is awkwardly silent. Like a movie without a soundtrack.
A coffeehouse without a functioning cash register is constipated. Like a pregnant woman.
Yesterday at the coffeehouse my principle role was not as barista. It was as troubleshooter. An hour into my shift, one of the speakers started making a thumping noise that caused patrons to start glancing around in concern. After disconnecting the offending speaker and calling all the techies on the employee phone list, I eventually had music running through the soundboard we use for live music.
A bit later, as I was about to take my break, the cash register locked up. Our sole owner-manager was absent and not responding to phone calls, so I broke out the reset manual myself. Twenty minutes later, the register was still locked up, but I had successfully reset its entire memory. When my boss arrived an hour later and announced that she would have to pull an all-nighter to rectify the damage done, my frazzled state delayed the realization that this was actually, to some degree, my fault.
The blessed redemption of the day was that I only had to do about three loads of dishes, a paltry amount for us barista-cum-dishwashers.
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3 comments:
You lucky thing, you. Don't worry, I messed up the cash register a few times this summer. Having a degree in technology does not always help. And only sometimes does a user manual help.
I wanna know what that post had to do with "Computer Programmers" being from Mars, being a self-consumed computer programmer by trade…
But yeah, bummer of a day. On the bright side: you didn't get fired! I guess that probably wasn't the right thing to say ;)
Troubleshooters = Computer Programmers, i.e. troubleshooters and baristas are really from different planets, as demonstrated by my failure as a troubleshooter.
Yeah, but they really couldn't fire me, because I had already put in my two weeks the day before. That's the clincher.
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