Back to basics with a bump

Our entire computer system went down at work today. We lost everything. Tills, cameras, desktops. Even the pumps were affected as they’re run by software that links them to the mainframe in the garage. (Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about? Because I don’t…) Monday morning is always very busy for us early on as we get loads of people wanting to ‘fill up for the week’ on their way to work, so the forecourt rapidly descended into chaos. This wouldn’t have happened a couple of years ago, but since our big refit for the overnight shift inclusion everything is reliant on everything else and so if one cog somewhere goes kaputski the whole system goes to shit. And there’s nothing we can do about it. It doesn’t matter how loudly you shout at me, Mr. Almeira Driver With The Silly Hat, I can’t bypass anything or ‘take cash and write it up later’ because if it isn’t done on the touch screens in the filling station it’ll register as a non-payment and automatically send your details to the police. 
Although it wouldn’t have this morning, as the security stuff is all run by, guess what?, the same computer that sorts everything else.
As the world becomes more automated and mechanised the more it is prone to a meltdown. 
So after several confrontations with customers, several attempted phone calls to senior management who refuse to start work before 9am on a Monday, and several begging messages sent to the technical support people, we were finally sorted by lunchtime and up and running normally all afternoon. My blood pressure was probably 230 over 100, my pulse rate was probably 200 beats a minute, and I’ve probably shaved five years off my life, but we made it through somehow and the only damage is the loss of a few thousand pounds in revenue, which will look bad in my monthly figures but doesn’t really affect me personally. It’s not as if they’ll dock my wages to cover the shortfall. They’ll just have some shitty pointless internal investigation that will come to some shatteringly impressive conclusion like “Computers sometimes go bad” and write yet another new policy procedure for what we should do if it happens again.
Which it probably will, let’s be honest. 

RC 23-10-17