I installed a set of shelves and drawers in the work area, making this place one project closer to perfect. From there, I went into the shop, where I concluded one of my most successful weeks to date. It could have been better, but the new system is not perfect. That’s Café Manager Lite, and it is easy to use but if it jams, requires me to be there. When I say jams, the system only works in a complete cycle from a given starting point. If a screen saver pops up, or the last customer doesn’t log out, either the computer or the controller have to be cycled back to the starting point.Yet the new system is such a vast improvement, it or something like it will be the standard from now on. The extra time has given me opportunity to re-examine the printer situation. I can see that large amounts of people have the same difficulty finding a product that counts the number of pages printed by a given computer. It was the difficulty slash impossibility of this that caused me to remove my printer after a $181 loss in one month. Somebody printed up 1,400 sheets of paper without paying for it.
I may have found a solution. Of all the ridiculous things, the available software is called a printer “monitor”. This dumb name again shows the axiomatic inability of computer people to call objects in user-friendly terms. I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t call it a keyboard or a hard drive. Despite their innate stupidity, I may have found something.
It is called Printer Squirrel Lite. While finding dozens of programs that work on domains, and costing up to $750, I found a page that mentions this application “is available” as shareware for PTP (peer-to-peer, my network). That is all I want, when I find shareware that works, I send the guy some money. If it doesn’t work, I shouldn’t pay anything. Are you listening, Microsoft? I was able to find several specification lists, which despite over-technical wording, seem to detect the IP access of each computer on a network and display the pages printed.
Some of the software works only at “the departmental” level, whatever that means, and some of it produces only “a log suitable for export to a spreadsheet”. I want a simpler system where we click a button when the customer walks up to the counter, and it displays the number of pages that were printed on a given terminal. The big picture is that the growing sophistication of this little business is 100% understood by me from the ground up. Let’s examine that last statement in just a wee more detail.
True, the whole Internet Café and Internet access thing has been around a long time, meaning others have already solved each of the problems I encounter. It is what others have not done that is more significant. They have not solved the problems in a practical manner at a practical price. I first suspected and now confirm that when you walk into these slick cafes, very little of the “wiring” was done by the manager. If I had to bring in installers to set up the system I now have, it would easily have cost me more than $10,000 -$12,000 (in labor alone) by now and, take a breath, I would be at the further mercy of those technicians. Not a pretty thought.
The printer is just the next phase. When that is back in operation, I would like to find a “change machine”. The nature of my business is that I don’t have or want a cash register. I could install a dollar changer, but it would seem logical to give back only the unspent portion. Let me give an example. My business is set up for dozens of transactions per day, all in the $2 to $3 range. Too many customers try to pay with a twenty, meaning the quick dash next door to get change. Using a float does not work, nor do I like the idea of a stack of twenties lying on the back counter by end of the day.
The machine I want gives only “dollar” change, that is, no coins. I’ve long calculated the efficiencies of such a machine are so great that I could simply round down all prices to the next lowest dollar. Thus, a tab of $7.90 is rounded down to $7.00. It is just not worth handling the 90 cents. This also avoids the Canada logic of “I had to raise my prices to cover the costs of charging more.” My machine would let you feed a ten-dollar bill in one end and three dollars would come out the other end – the unspent portion of your money. No till, no cashier, the float is locked inside the box, nice or what?
Describing this machine has a strange effect on people. They launch into their experiences with ordinary vending machines, slot readers and coin mechanisms, like I have not already looked into all that. Only one person in fifty seems to recognize that I’m describing a mature concept and don’t need any kindergarten-level input. Worse, most people don’t even grasp the theory and require extensive over-explanation to even visualize how it works. What has become of this country!
