alexpgp | One cash register, ready for service...

I got good and sick and tired of translating for the day, even if I did stop half a page short of my goal. I've got a little contingency built into my plan (so I may as well use it, right?)

So, seeing as how the store was overwhelmed with customers today, I figured I'd apply myself to the task of bringing up the "other" cash register that we found under a pile of junk after we bought the store.

The unit is a Casio PCR-260. The backup batteries are doubtless the original set (Casio brand). I could not find a manual in the store, so I went to look online for it, and found only a Spanish-language version of the document at the Casio web site.

Issues with the unit:
(a) new ink supply needs to be installed;
(b) time and date need to be set;
(c) appropriate tax table needs to be set;
(d) "departments" need to be set up;
(e) taxable departments need to be set up that way;
(f) the plastic arms for the $10 and $20 bills are missing and need to be jerry-rigged.

The first item was taken care of with a store-bought replacement roller. Item (d) was taken care of by prying off the plastic key tops and replacing them with newly inscribed key tops. Item (f) was taken care of by sacrificing a wire coat-hanger.

The rest of the job required looking at the manual (and thanks to

tamaraland for her offer to help me make sense of it). It turns out, though, that there are enough recognizable cognates and roots in Spanish (e.g., "Fácil de utilizar") that between my Russian and French, and a talent for using context to make guesses (Ciertas teclas tienen dos funciones = Certain [plural noun related to illustration of keypad] have two functions... duh), I really didn't have any problems reading the book (though I did open a Spanish-English dictionary a couple of times to double-check meanings).

My first hurdle was getting the unit into "program" mode. It wouldn't let me, displaying an E01. Scanning the first couple of pages of the manual, I saw the following note (my approximate translation next to it):

Si se cambia de posición el selector de modo durante una operación de regestro o de programación, se genera un error (aparece E01 en la pantalla).

If the mode selector moves out of position during a register or programming operation, an error will occur (E01 will appear in the display)

So, guessing that someone may have doodled on the keypad before I got to it, I hit the "AMT TEND" key and cleared what appeared to be a register operation in progress. Now, I was cooking with gas.

Setting the time and date was easy, especially since the manual walks you through the process with examples out of a calculator handbook. Basically, this consists of a series of button illustrations printed in the order they need to be pressed, with annotations off to one side. Entering the appropriate values to kick in the local 7% tax table went pretty smoothly, too.

Setting up which "departments" the tax applied to took two tries, as by now I was simply looking at the examples, and got it backward the first time. After winnowing down the store's 16 "departments" to the unit's limit of 10, it turned out that all of the taxable stuff was in the "Retail" department, so that made life easy.

What will not be easy will be training folks to use this baby, since the procedure for hitting the keys is somewhat different from what is used for our "main" cash register in the store. It's not that hard, though, and I smell a training session tomorrow morning.

Cheers...