Computers? Fuck 'em!

I'm as big a fan of computers as the next guy. Assuming that the next guy has bought into the myth that using computers will save time, effort and give back so much more useful information than was available before.

I'm starting to think that computerising everything is not always worth the effort.

I've been struggling on with my swanky new till for a while now and am finally pretty happy with the set-up of the till itself. The software for it, on the other hand, is a great big pile of steaming horse-shit. It's OK for keeping the prices and descriptions of all my products backed up. It'll allow me to adjust those prices and whatnot without needing to fiddle with the till itself. Even though it's actually far quicker to do so on the till itself. It'll even allow me to download the sales data so I can see how much of each item I'm selling.

Great.

Sadly, the one main function that I really really want from this till is to analyse the sales data week on week. Can I do that? Can I fuck. The only sales figures the software will allow me to view is what I've just downloaded from it. As soon as you download one weeks data, last weeks data vanishes off into the ether. Fucking excellent. Will it export these figures into a spreadsheet so I can analyse them there? Nope, that would make far too much sense.

The best I've managed to do, is put the sales figure manually from one program into a spreadsheet. Y'know, by hand. Without the aid of computers and stuff doing it automatically and easily for me. I'm starting to get really fucked off with spending fucking hours every fucking week doing this. It wouldn't be quite so bad but as new products are added on to the till, it fucks up the positions of everything that was already on the spreadsheet and I've then got to spend my remaining free time checking that I've not accidentally buggered up the last few weeks worth of stuff. The stuff that I checked last week. And the week before. As you may be able to sense, I'm a tad peeved about this.

I'm now faced with a very annoying trilemma (what do you mean, that not a word? It is now, FUCK OFF!!!). Do I carry on doing what I'm doing to the point where I don't even have to time to sleep cos there's so much old data to check? Do I spunk away £500 on some new software that might actually do what I want it to or do I give it all up as a bad job and miss out on some potentially very useful sales data?

Also, my anti-virus software keeps alerting me to the fact that I have a wireless keybaord and it may be a keylogger despite the fuck knows how many times I've told it to ignore it and Windows media player keeps fucking crashing the second I try to listen to music on it. With this added annoyance and the lack of soothing music, I've been a bit on the stroppy side. Unlike my normal tolerant and even tempered self you understand.