[Shop-talk] Stubbornness and the impediments to troubleshooting

[eric at megageek.com]

First, I have way too many stories of my incompetence in troubleshooting to share here.  But this one just happened this past week.

So I was building a new database application to track the sales of a store I have.  I was getting a sales report from the point of sale (POS) system each night and I was running it into my homemade inventory database.  
I was tracking sale price, credit card use, discount, sales tax, and final price (among other metrics.)

I was banging my head on the wall because I could NOT get my formulas to match the POS system's report.  It kept calculating the wrong credit card fee and sales tax.
I would keep scrapping my work and starting fresh to ensure I wasn't dealing with a hidden issue.
Note, my dog passed away sometime ago, and seeing as I only have cats, I don't talk to them when I'm on the computer or they will think that I need a 10lbs furball laying directly across my keyboard!

Then, I tried it in excel. Low and behold, I got the same incorrect results.

Then I took out a paper and pencil, yet I got the same wrong results.  NOTHING would match the report I was getting.

Then, I tried to calculate it off their sheet.  Turns out, the POS system was WRONG!  UGH!  Hours and hours of work down the drain because the POS system calculated the wrong percentage of sale price!  (NJ just dropped from 7% to 6.875%.)

Ouch!

I only share this one because it was one of the few times I was NOT the idiot.  8>)



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Tech Viper
"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory." Ralph Waldo Emerson