Decaflon

I cannot think of a worse experience than spending the time shopping, loading over $100 of groceries on the checkout belt...and the computers go down. No prices on anything so there is no way to revert back to the older cash registers.

You should have seen it when the system went down @ the furniture store I used to work at...

They stood there for an HOUR scratching their heads before they figured out you could use a pen and paper to record the orders and transactions and put them in AFTER we got back up.

It was sad.

I would've responded to this sooner but I was busy refreshing the notes index page to see what else was going on...

Pen and paper are not obsolete! People are so helpless without "the system" and if it goes down, it takes their brain with it.

Write it down, key it in later, it's possible!

peroty... it took them an HOUR to figure that out, and three of us were yelling PEN AND PAPER the whole time.

I still use a pen and paper to record important things. Although I would say my life-style is fairly dependent on computers; I pride myself on the fact that I would be able to survive longer than most people I know if the internet went down. I'd just write down all my blog posts on paper and "key them in later".

RightOn, that sounds pretty horrible.

@RightOn

You should clearly have stolen the items. :) Maybe it would teach them to grow a brain.

And then they'd have one week's worth of digital paperwork to cover the incident. This is just sad.

At work, no one can function at all without computers. It would be sad if it weren't laughable.
The other side to this is equally frustrating to me; when (not if) data is entered wrong, not one person takes responsibility for this and gets out of their chair to physically locate the case in question. If the screen doesn't say it, it doesn't exist.

To be blunt, I would be absolutely fucked without computers. As would the world around me.

One minor example is that all my homework and assignments are stored on my computer. Without that, I'd be back to "my dog ate it." And though I could hand write them, where would I download plagiarised essays to pass off as my own from?

It just pissed me off that there was no alternative method for getting something so simple done.

It's a payoff. With computers everywhere we can do more complex and wonderful things than ever before. On the other hand things like this happen. For now, at least, we're still in the adolescent years of computing.

If we'd have no computers to depend on, you'd probably be frustrated and venting (on the 9r snail-mail list) over PepBoys' order for new tires still being processed (because the tire manufacturer was busy filing reports for new gloves for the factory workers).

:)

@creat1ve: What you're describing isn't computer dependency. It's rising stupidity, with computers used as an excuse.

Any reasonably intelligent person would've grabbed a piece of paper and taken your order. These were not reasonably intelligent people.

yeah, sometimes we just need to shut the box off.