CTRL+Fail

I worked at a crappy furniture and arcade machine store for a short time.

One day, while I’m out on the sales floor looking for things that needed cleaning or whatever, a pair of movers came in, saying they were here to pick up a (retro game) machine. I asked what name it was under; they gave me a name.

I got behind the desk and looked for a search bar in the orders system. It didn’t appear to have one. So, I clicked the name column, hoping I could sort the names alphabetically, but no dice. There wasn’t a separate game name column because not everything we sold was a game. Just a name, details, phone number, and email were the four columns you had.

Well, I decided to just CTRL+F [Customer Name] and find it that way. The CTRL+F window didn’t find his name. Oddly enough, it didn’t find the game name, either. It was a pretty common game, so I was pretty surprised there were no orders in the system for it. We even had a mostly gutted cabinet that still had the marquee to that game, but no motherboard or monitor. It was out on the sales floor, not in the back of the store.

I told the movers there was no record of a [Game Name] or a [Customer Name] in our system. They glared at me and began searching the store on their own, eventually finding the gutted remains of the [Game Name] that we just so happened to have in the store.

They said they were going to have to file a damaged item report, as they had delivered us a machine that just needed a monitor repair or replacement, and they started taking pictures. I asked for the serial number, but they didn’t know what it was.

In a bit of a panic, I went searching the back room for another [Game Name] and left a message for my boss at the same time, stating that movers were here to pick up [Game Name] for [Customer] but I couldn’t find either in our system. There was no sign of another [Game Name] in the back.

With that, the movers left the store empty-handed.

I later found that the inventory system not only didn’t allow for sorting orders in any way, but it didn’t even support CTRL-F. In other words, if we had a Pac-Man machine, for example, you could CTRL-F Pac-Man and get no results!

It turned out the gutted machine was the one that belonged to the customer after all. The boss and the other employees just took everything out and left the machine like that, while they were waiting for a new bezel and LCD mounting kit. However, they had neither ordered the LCD nor the board, nor checked if we already had those things in stock. They just stopped dead in their tracks when the bezel was running late, and didn’t even update the customer on their machine, or return the customer’s calls or emails.

They essentially ghosted the customer, to the point that he thought that the store had gone out of business, until he drove back to the store and saw it still operating.

The store did, in fact, go bankrupt a few months later.