After the mess that was fixing my car this weekend, my problems from yesterday were not a welcome addition. Monday morning, I was woken up at 9:30 by a call from work. One of the registers up front had crashed and wouldn't boot up again.

Tuesday, after I got to work, it was immediately apparent that it was a failed hard drive. It was receiving SMART errors and making clicking sounds instead of booting. Because it was a necessity to get it up and running quickly, I went down the street (in someone else's car) to get a new hard drive for it. I hadn't even bothered to check the warranty, because get a replacement that way would have taken too long. I've discovered since then that it doesn't matter anyway. The drive was 4 years old.

The rest of my morning, up until about 1:00 PM, was spent reinstalling Windows and the various programs required to make it work as a register on our system. But I kept being interrupted by a printer problem on the other register up front. At about 1:00, I took the almost finished register computer back up front to hook it up and install the printer drivers. But the fun didn't stop there.

As I was hooking it up, I discovered that our AS/400, that hosts most of our software, had crashed. I ran to the back to find out what was wrong. The UPS for the server was off. I turned it on and walked away. A minute later, I walked back by and it was off again. Every time I turned it back on, it would almost immediately shut back down. This wasn't going to work.

To bypass the problem and get us running again, I plugged the AS/400 directly into the wall. We have another UPS in the building, but it's already running 3 servers and doesn't have enough capacity to run the AS/400 as well.

Forty-five minutes later, after the AS/400 had booted back up, I was finally able to finish setting up the register computer. But then the other printer kept failing all day and it's hard to work on it when they're trying to use it. So for the last two hours, I rigged that register to use the printer from the newly rebuilt one that wasn't being used that day anyway.

This morning, I spent 30 minutes cleaning out the non-working printer. Once I could finally watch it failing to feed properly, it was apparent it was a mechanical problem. I converted it to feed from the front instead of the back after cleaning it, and it seems to be working fine now.

If my car hadn't started working yesterday, it would have been a complete disaster of a day.