So I'm a cashier at a grocery store. It's almost the end of an 8-hour (plus lunch) shift, and a family comes through with just over $150 worth of stuff (which really isn't unusual). We have a coupon going around for a free rug with a $150 purchase. They hand over one of these and the rug to go with it. I scan the rug and the coupon both rather quickly, and the computer hesitates a bit.


And then it crashes. Boom. Whole program goes blooey, drops back to a Win2K command window, wipes out the whole order.


Personally I just found the whole thing rather hilarious, but it kinda sucked for them having to do the whole thing over again. Apparently someone had changed some settings relating to this particular coupon...


Especially amusing was the contents of the command window. Something like:
C:\> IF -1353468584 EQU cmd THEN do_something

C:\> IF -1353468977 EQU cmd THEN do_another_thing

C:\> IF -1353468246 EQU cmd THEN shutdown_system

C:\> IF -1353468901 EQU cmd THEN program_dump

Manager command executed: -1353468901

So apparently...

• This program is, at least partially, a Windows batch file.


• Commands are large negative numbers.


• There exists a manager command to crash the program.


• Somehow, even without manager access, I managed to activate that command just by scanning a coupon.

This is the same system that randomly opens the cash drawer after using a credit card and randomly rejects valid passwords up to 5 times in a row, so... (yes that's a known issue not just me being a sucky typist )



Oh, and someone bought something called "Mactavish's Butter". Which the display shortened to "Mactavish's Butt".

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