It's not often that Mrs. HM will retract a previous proclamation. Especially one made to Farmer H. But I now take back my declaration that the Hillmomba Casey's operates like a third-world country. That is an insult to third-world countries.
What I encountered in the Hillmomba Casey's on Sunday is behavior that might be expected during the Stone Age. When a woman with hair similar to my current lovely lady-mullet might have ridden a mastodon to her local convenience cave to pick up a 44 oz bark tube of her magical elixir, and some games of chance whittled on small-animal bones.
I popped into the Hillmomba Casey's, intent on buying three scratchers. I named them by number. The regular Old Lady Clerk who is always nice to me ripped them out of the scratcher case. She stepped over to her register, and swiped them under the lottery ticket scanner that sits, mounted in it's plastic holster, on the counter. It did not make its regular BLOOP noise as she waved the barcode under it.
"Oh, no! Don't do this to me AGAIN! This is the third time today! It's been acting up. I can't get into the other register."
With that, Old Lady Clerk took the handheld scanner out of the plastic holster and
BAM! BAM! BAM!
...whacked it on the counter. Hard!
"Sometimes that'll fix it. I had it so scared the other day, it didn't want NONE of that!"
She did it again! Twice more! BAM! BAM! BAM! Still didn't scan.
"I'm going to have to restart the register."
Off she went into the back room. I guess to pull a switch, or restart from a main computer.
"I'm sorry. It will take about five minutes to come back up."
"Um. Is it a problem if I don't wait?"
"No."
"Okay. Sorry. I wasn't planning to wait."
It's not that I had anywhere to go, but there was a line forming. I didn't want to stand there on display as the cause of the delay. Besides, there was no guarantee that the scanner would work even after the register came back on.
I went to Country Mart instead. I won $10. Maybe I would have won more on the Casey's tickets. Maybe not. I figured she could stuff them back in the case. I've gotten tickets before that had originally been torn off for someone else. It's easy to hear the ripping noise of the perforation.
I feel bad for the people waiting to pay for their gas. Hope they weren't trying to buy scratchers!
2 comments:
Sounds to me like they need to upgrade their equipment. Fast. Like yesterday.
River,
I'm sure the state lottery commission would provide them with another scanner. After all, they want to sell as many tickets as possible. Or at least they could loan the store another while they have this one worked on. New lottery tickets come in every week. Surely the store could also ask for a scanner when they send in their request for specific tickets.
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