Storm Season
As is customary Queensland summer fashion, we had a freak thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. These storms come and go very quickly, and this one was no exception. In the quarter-hour it takes me to walk down to work, it went from dry and overcasty to completely pouring rain in the space of a few minutes. I thus walked into work completely soaked and had to change into another uniform for the night.
It was my first time wearing short sleeves for a shift too... I felt so rebellious and liberated!
There were even reports of hail in some areas. The rain is extremely intense and visibility drops dramatically. There are sometimes even flash floods in prone areas and there are lots of fallen tree branches on roads and onto power lines.
These lead to blackouts, some ranging from the momentary to ones that last for hours.
No power is the worst
We had a brief blackout at work during the storm. This results in a total loss of power to the entire club for a moment, whilst the backup generator switches on and restores power temporarily until the mains is fixed.
During that time, everywhere outside of the club may be without power but we have about half a day to a days' worth of electricity available to use. For a place as big and as power-hungry as our place, that's actually pretty good.
The worst of the power outage, however, are the customers. When all the machines switch off and restart, they immediately panic and try to get their money out. Naturally, this is impossible, and we need to go around and reassure them to let them know their money is safe.
The big problem is when they attempt to collect their money when a machine has restarted but hasn't yet connected to the network. When that happens, we need to manually collect their money ourselves, which is fine when you do it one at a time but when you have to do 10 or more, this quickly eats up time that we don't really have to be rushing around and picking up after people who don't listen.
What's happening with the machine is that whilst the money is in the machine, the record of it is stored on the network, but when a customer tries to take money out of the machine, it can't because it can't verify with the network that the money is actually there. As a result, the machine stalls the payout and won't print the money ticket out. We need to physically reset the machine with a key and then attend to that payout manually.
It's actually a good failsafe against imbalanced books and it makes sure that no money is leaving the system without being confirmed that it is allowed to, and in the long haul makes our lives easier, but I really wished people would listen to us when we ask them not to collect.