I just crashed the debit card reader at Walmart. It had an Ingenico label on it. Here’s what I did…
1. Selected English
2. Swiped my card
3. The teller asked if it was credit and I said “yeah sure”
4. She said “Press Cancel and select Credit”
5. I hit “Credit”, which was right there on the screen next to “ATM”
6. It started to authorize
7. The teller exclaimed “Oh no you have to hit Cancel!” and started hitting buttons
8. The keys she punched obviously set the reader back to the start screen
9. I attempted to follow her advice, swiping and hitting Cancel.
10. This failed, but we repeated it 2 or 3 times
11. During the last attempt, the reader screen went blank
12. It flashed black, then white, then posted a boot screen, something about Initializing, incrementing a percentage
13. Eventually the Walmart logo scrolled up and down the screen for about 4 minutes
14. Finally dropped me back to start – another teller came by and said “Run the card through the cash machine”, and that worked.
It was a bit surreal to have something as trivial as a card reader malfunction like that… makes me wonder if I could get it to crash again…Maybe Ingenico needs to consider a name change… Ungenico?…
