Stuff that should be fairly easy but isn't.

I've spent much of the last two weeks doing two things that should be pretty easy (especially for someone as clever as I am. Modesty aside, I am really fucking clever. You'd best hope I never have any plans for world domination cos it'd be a piece of piss for someone as amazingly bright as I am. I just can't be arsed with all the work it would involve. You'd best cower in front of me just on the off chance I change my mind though).

Now that my gargantuan intelligence has been established beyond a shadow of a doubt, the things I've been trying to do are setting up a new swanky till and getting my head round some accounting software. Oh yes, I have decided to modernise. The old till was practically a relic from Arkwrights' shop. A replacement has been mooted for a while but became a priority when the motor for the receipt winder thingy died. Having to take the top off to manually crank round the spool before it started spewing paper all over the place was less than ideal. Some web-surfing and a few days later my posh new till complete with scanner and PC software turns up. The software boasted of having nearly 5,000 product codes already installed. "Excellent!" Thinks I, "That'll save me some time." Fat fucking chance. Only about 300 of these products are ones that I actually stock. Having 40 different varieties of Heinz soup must be great for some retailers but useless to me. Cue several hours of removing the pointless products and pricing up the things we do actually stock. DULL DULL DULL DULL FUCKING DULL. Trying to send this info from my laptop to the till proved to be even less fun. I'll spare you the details but suffice to say, a whole valuable Saturday afternoon was totally wasted. Fucknuts!!! Even fairly basic stuff proved to be nigh-on impossible due to a combination of a piss-poor instruction manual (I may be astonishingly clever and able to pick up new skills really quickly with minimal help but that also means I'm clever enough to RTFM*. As Buddha said "The first step to wisdom is realising how little you know" At least I think it was Buddha. It might have been Fat Mike in the pub.) and deliberately obscure procedures made this a nightmare. Example, to tell it to keep a printed journal of all the transactions instead of printing out receipts, you have to:

turn the key to pgm
press "SBTL"
Look up the journal entry in the manual (made even more tricky due to lack of index)
type in the number pertaining to the journal
press "X/time"
decide how you'd like the journal (small/regular font size, journal on or off etc)
add up the numbers assigned to each option.
input that number
press "CASH"

On the old till, it was a case of flicking a switch from receipt to journal. Progress eh?

Eventually, I got the things talking and sent over the products codes that were useful. Next came the task of programming all the bar codes of the things I do actually stock but weren't already pre-programmed. You'd have thought that the till designers would have made this procedure as easy as possible. Nope. It's initially complicated and time-consuming. Cue another whole weekend being swallowed up by this project. Even after that, only about 25% of my stock is programmed in. Fortunately one of my staff members is happy enough and competent enough to carry on with this task. Phew! With any luck it'll only be about three weeks from delivery to the point where I can state that the till is properly set up.

Modern technology eh? It allows you to do your job twice as quickly but generates twice as much fucking work. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Luddite. I love gadgets and gizmo's but fuck me ragged I swear most designers don't realise that the people who are going to use this kit aren't quite as familiar with it as they are.

Don't even get me started on the accounts software. I fear it may end up with a batshit crazy armed rampage.

* Read The Fucking Manual.