A little ice cream never hurt nobody?

Vetle Økland
Problem Based Learning
2 min readAug 24, 2016

At work over the summer, I got a report that one of our cash registers was not working, so I went over to fix the problem. The computer was not booting up and was beeping every other second. I immediately recognized the BIOS-beeping and took the machine up to my office to unscrew it and see if there was something I could fix right away. It turned out there was ice cream on some of the parts inside the machine which made it stop working.

Obviously, with ice cream seeping into the computers, there is an underappreciation for IT equipment. Seeing fleece jackets covering entire computers, popcorn floating over them, or cotton candy stuck to the side of computers is not an unusual sight. People seem to have a hard time understanding that it is not only my problem when computers start malfunctioning, it is also their problem when they no longer have the right tools to perform their job correctly.

The good thing about the situation is that, in order to fix it, I was able to use some spare parts that we’d had lying in our storage for a while. The bad thing is that we definitely lost revenue during the half hour it took me to disassemble the machine, replace parts and assemble it again. While the outlet was still operating, the customers where sent to another outlet to pay, which made the queue longer and that will make people go past it instead of buying something from there.

The situation occurred because of multiple factors, one was that the staff was not properly trained in how to treat IT equipment. Another factor was that the equipment was not placed at a location that was well thought through. And a third factor was that the equipment was not properly insulated, in regards to where it was standing.

In conclusion, we should have had, working, spare computers and quick deployment of the cash register configurations so that, instead of spending half an hour fixing this, it would only take 10 minutes or less.

If a similar situation would rise again, all we would have to do is swap out the computer with a backup one and go through a three-step configuration for that specific outlet. If, then, our backup computer would crash again, another solution is to disassemble the machine on-site and swap out parts there and then. No matter where a cash register would crash, there is not that far to walk to our IT storage, so if a situation like this happened again, all we would have to do is bring a spare-computer (aka. broken) to the outlet and swap out the parts on-site. This would minimalize the time from seeing the problem until it is fixed, as we would not have to bring the broken computer anywhere.

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