After technical issues with the servers caused University Dining locations to be unable to process credit cards twice last week, Randy Lait, University Dining business officer, said the University will be working to rebuild the system as soon as the semester ends.
“The servers just got bogged down from trying to run end of the night reports … which caused the server to become overloaded later in the day when the end of the night process didn’t finish,” Lait said.
This glitch caused the registers to be unable to process credit and debit card transactions for approximately 45 minutes on April 8 and 11, according to Lait.
The University is currently taking steps to prevent the problem from reoccurring, he said. However, he added that fixing the problem now can cause the system to be down for as much as 12 hours, so Dining will wait until the semester ends to completely rebuild the system and make sure the issue doesn’t happen again.
“We think we can keep things the way they are now and we’ll be fine,” Lait said. “As soon as school’s out, we will take the system offline for a day, rebuild everything and balance the load, so it will run with quicker responses system wide.”
Despite those two glitches, Lait said the system has been working well, although he said the University has made some adjustments.
One of these adjustments, he said, was with the touch screen registers. When employees would ring up customers paying with credit cards, he said, they would have to hit a pay button which was located on top of a keypad on the touch screen.
“Sometimes the cashiers were faster than the computer, or if they lingered too long on the pay button, they would press a ‘six’ by accident,” Lait said. “Then if they hit Visa and swiped the card, it would ring up as $0.06 as a payment and then it wouldn’t let you pay any more.”
Lait said Dining rearranged the components on the touch screen so that it would not happen again.
Despite these problems with the new system, Lait said they “fully intend to keep going with the acceptance of credit cards at University Dining locations.”
The University also plans to add American Express as an acceptable form of payment after this semester, he said.
Jaron Leung, employee of the Bragaw C-Store and sophomore in business management, said he has seen few problems when processing credit or debit card transactions.
“Except for when the system goes down, which I think has only happened once or twice, it’s been working fine,” Leung said.
According to Lait, the system was first installed in Nov. 2007, added to the Atrium January, and then added to the rest of University Dining locations, such as the c-stores, in March.
Since the system’s debut, Lait said students have received it well.
“In March, which was a short month with spring break, we did 19,361 credit card transactions on the new MICROS registers,” he said.
Leung said he had also seen a large number of students using credit and debit cards in the Bragaw C-Store.
“A lot of people are using them because they are running out of board bucks,” he said.
Ed Mason, freshman in biology, said that although the system was down last week, he is glad the University will continue to accept credit and debit cards.
“It’s convenient because when I forget my [student ID] I can just use my debit card for my meals,” Mason said.
