Shallow Thoughts : tags : misc

A haunted clock

One of the local digital clocks has developed some odd behavior.

It's in a location where it doesn't get seen that much, so it never got reset to daylight savings time, and consequently has been off by an hour since the last time switch. But that's not the odd part.

The odd part is that some time in the evening, between 10 and 11 pm, it stops displaying 9:something or 10:something like it had been, and switches to 12:44. It will then stay on 12:44 for hours, usually all night and occasionally into the morning, before switching back to one-hour-before-current-time some time in the mid-morning. Then it stays at the (one hour off from) correct time all day -- it doesn't fail again in the afternoon to show 12:44 pm. It only does its 12:44 trick late at night.

Once I noticed it, I tried resetting it to daylight savings time, to see if that would kick it out of its old habits. After the reset, the time stayed correct through most of the evening (I had an insomniac night, so I had all too many chances to check it). But then in the morning, around 8 am, there it was, showing 12:44 again. It corrected itself before 10 am.

Definitely one of the odder failure modes I've seen in a while ...

Tags: misc
[ 14:55 Jul 27, 2012    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Breaking out of the Walgreens Infinite Loop

Ever get caught in the Walgreens Infinite Loop?

You're phoning in a prescription refill, going through the automated prompts, everything's going fine, and you get to the point where it asks you, "If you will be picking up your prescription tomorrow, press 1. If you will be picking up your prescription today, press 2."

And you mistakenly press 2 when you meant to press 1.

Now you're stuck. "Please enter the pickup time in hours and minutes." Except it's already past 11pm, and anything you try gives you "Please allow at least one hour. Please enter the pickup time ..." No option to switch days or go back to an earlier prompt. You can't press 0 for an operator -- they're closed, there's nobody there. But you can't just hang up, either -- what would happen to your order then? What if they marked it against one of your allowed refills and ... gave it to someone else! Oh no!

But I found the solution after some experimentation: pressing 0, when after hours, breaks out of the loop and schedules the refill for 10am the next morning. Sorry about the rush order, folks. Honestly, I would have been fine waiting another day. I just couldn't find any other way to break out of the loop.

Tags: misc
[ 09:36 Aug 11, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]