The week begins with, of all things, an earthquake, and it looks as though it will end with Irene. Does it get any more extreme than that? While the current track appears to have her make landfall here on the Eastern Shore sometime late Sunday, Irene will definitely be affecting the weather all weekend, if only by dumping wheel barrels of rain and blowing blustery winds. Fill up those 5 gallon pails gang!
I suppose I could blame our current issue with the credit card connection on the Earthquake...but it actually began last Friday, so maybe that was the ForeShock. (Did anyone feel the aftershock last night at 1 AM?) The internet in our building - and more specifically our office - has been a little wonky lately, and the main effect is that our connection with the credit card server has been spotty. On Friday I broke down and called Delaware Business Systems - the installer of our Digital Dining software, on which we are quite dependent - after spending literally hours on the phone with various banking entities, because they all blamed the software. The tech from DBS rebooted something on his end and two minutes $89 later, things were up and running again.
For a couple days, anyway.
Yesterday it began again. Internet up and not up. I couldn't send my batch (credit card deposit) through because there was no connection to the clearinghouse. Internet came back up, clearinghouse connection did not. Try again a little later. Batch goes through, all seems fine.
For a couple of hours, anyway.
Just before lunch, internet goes down again. Uh oh. Better get the "knuckle scraper" out (thanks David, for reminding me of that!) in case we have to do manual entry for credit cards. And now I am on the phone with the internet tech and DBS. I leave a message at DBS and I am on hold with the internet people when I notice that we are being remotely handled by DBS. I hang up on no one and call DBS. He does a bunch of stuff, we reboot and try again. This time, and it's only about 1:15, still 45 minutes to go in the lunch hour and 2 tables still in the dining room, it crashes the computer. Back to the phone. Back to the remote tech moving the mouse all over the screen. House Charges all around and we eventually try again. Same result.
Everything revolves around that computer and the software that basically manages the dining room. We clock in and out on it, we program menu items on it, we track sales and house accounts and payroll on it. It would be very hard to live without it for any extended period of time. It was 3:30 yesterday when DBS got us at least going again, albeit without the credit card capabilities. I told the tech as long as we could close checks as house charges, we could deal with it. So that's how we handled last night. It's a little extra work for me, because I have to close all of those "house charges", and then at some point I have to close all of those payments as credit cards, using manual entry for each one.
And now, even as we speak, the DBS tech is remotely in our computer doing his thing.
Ten minutes later, he's finished and I am going to start closing yesterdays credit card checks. The double whammy of this is that not only do we get to pay DBS again for services rendered, we have to pay a higher fee to the credit card processor for using manual entry - putting in the credit card number manually, as opposed to swiping the card - to make credit card payments. Ouch.
It is what it is.
Here we have a special from Tuesday night - crab and capers on toast. Looks good.
Also from Tuesday, the cod with tomato and bacon. Looks good.
And finally we have Sue's Tuesday night veg plate. Sue is a regular on Tuesday nights, sometimes with her husband or friends, but most often out at the bar with her book. She is a vegetarian and Kevin tries to take good care of her. He almost always succeeds. Looks good!
Okay everyone, we're gonna put on our big girl pants, cowboy up and say "Good Night Irene!"
And pay with cash? Ha!
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