Anniversary Celebration

Today is my wedding anniversary. I was looking forward all afternoon to going out for dinner with my husband after closing the shop. When it was about time to close I got ready to close out the credit card terminal as always and the printer wouldn't work. After numerous tries of reconnecting power cords and such, I decided it had finally given up the ghost and called my credit card processing company's tech support to find out how to override the terminal's refusal to close out without a working printer.

With that done I needed to decide what to do about the printer problem. The terminal is quite ancient so buying a new printer for it seemed like a bad idea. I had a newer terminal that has both the processing and the printer in one unit. I called technical support again. And I guess saying "I called technical support again" doesn't really convey what that is like. I dial a very long number on my cell phone and then go through voice mail to get to the right department, then am prompted to enter my merchant number, which must be at least 20 digits. Entering these repeatedly on a cell phone is in and of itself quite a vexing experience. Suffice it to say I called them at least 4 times this evening and repeated this process each time. Once the cell phone cut out so I guess it was 5 times.

The first very nice tech support guy told me he could send me info to download to the new terminal and took me through a long and circuitous process of entering strange combinations of letters, numbers and what felt like Morse code into the unit. When we finally reached the download point the unit displayed, "Waiting for line" which meant it couldn't connect to the phone line. That was really a low point in the process. Did I mention I was really hungry?

After disconnecting the FAX, the phone, the terminal and reconnecting them in various configurations we managed to get the terminal to receive the phone signal. And yes, then I got to call tech support again to try the download thing again. We let it start downloading and finally went to dinner.

We returned to River Knits after dinner hoping the display would read "download complete" but I admit I was skeptical. Amazingly it WAS complete and after installing the new programming I tried it out by swiping my own credit card and EUREKA! It worked!

But at this point we had the terminal directly connected to the phone. We had bypassed the FAX and the actual telephone. A splitter and more phone line was needed to make the new terminal work. I went home to relieve my parents who had spent the afternoon with my kids and guess who spent his anniversary running to Target to buy a splitter and phone line and just called me from River Knits to say it was all working? Yes, my husband.

It is a great example of why he is a wonderful guy and why I'm really glad to be celebrating another anniversary. So if you happen to see him, tell him thanks for getting us back up & running so you can still buy yarn tomorrow! :-)