Interesting series of anecdotes (both the main post and the following comments) about maddening “this doesn’t make any sense” system crashes that had odd, obscure, unexpected answers.
Tony explained to me that for as long as they had had the new computer registers (3 years), every time a flash was used for the heavily promoted kids’ birthday parties, the stores would need to shut down for at least 15 minutes until the entire system could be rebooted. I went on my assignment (sans camera), but as soon as I returned I began asking questions of everyone, and they all said the same thing. In fact one of the dismrict managers showed me the paragraph in the store operations Manual that forbade flash pictures!
Here’s another one along the same vein:
http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=501