It starts at about 9:30 PM on Thursday. Store 2101 (Batesville, Missisipi) is having massive computer problems and they need a new register. They just opened and have been super super busy so they need their equipment now. They're about 500 miles away though, so they ask who wants to take a road trip. Me and Brian volunteer, and at 11:00 PM we head out. First though, we go my house, where I eat a quick dinner and grab my wallet and keys (which I had forgot), then go to his house where he fights with his girlfriend who demands to go with us. We don't let her though, and at about 12:15 we leave for Joplin. When we get to Joplin, Missouri, we fuel up (fuel is cheaper there) and at 1 AM we start for Batesville. We go south on the Interstate and go by Fayetville, Arkansas, then turn east on the Interstate and go through Little Rock. We stop for fuel and Dr. Pepper and then continue east to Memphis, Tennesse. We don't see much up to this point except for a huge tunnel that had no immediately apparent reason to exist. But, about the time we cross the Missisipi River, the sun is coming up. This river is *huge*. All we have in Kansas are creeks, I think you could have laid all of them side by side and still not been as wide as this river. We go through Memphis, but have to navigate a labyrinth of road work and lane splits. Eventually we come to some barrels that split the road. We're right behind a semi so we don't see them till the very last minute, and the directions aren't labelled. We go left. We're wrong, and we exit. We find a convience store, fuel up, and attempt to get back on the Interstate. We can't find an eastbound on-ramp, so we conclude we'll have to follow the highway we turned off on south all the way through Memphis and then get back on the Interstate there. As we involantarily take the scenic route, we notice that almost everything in Memphis seems to be prefixed "Dixie". We conclude we must be in Dixieland. About a half hour later, after many red lights it seems, we get back on the Interstate and proceed south without incident to Batesville, MS. This is the busiest Pizza Hut in the entire network that NPC owns. So we get there 1.5 hours *before* they open and they're already busy taking delivery orders. So we're like "Oh, crap! They're gonna be super busy as soon as they open!" so we get the register we brought with us and install it where register 1 was. One of their problems was that register 1 was in the most heavily used place in their store, and since register 1 is the network server and all the orders are stored there it was making everything go really slow. So we set that up, move register 1 to their office where no one will use it. So we get all that up and running and start checking network settings. They were totally wacked, it was a wonder their store worked at all. About this time the cooks and servers and delivery drivers started showing up (it had been just managers up to this point) and the kitchen is packed with employees and pizzas start rolling out of the oven 10 at a time. Their oven has 2 conveyers that are 2.5 feet wide and they just loaded them up! People were still calling in wanting pizzas and they had to tell them the ovens were backed up an hour and a half. Anyway, since this was a new store, the Area General Manager, Division Vice President, and the Division Human Resource Manager (bunches of big heads) were there too and when the servers told them how fast everything was they were like, "We love you guys!" But, their delivery computer was messed up, it wouldn't connect to the network. So we doinked with it until we noticed it wasn't plugged in to the hub and hooked it in, they also said it was forcing them to dispatch drivers in sequence. So we fixed their configuration settings, then started messing with the printer, which was giving an error every time they tried to print. We eventually traced it to the cable and went to Radio Shack to buy another one. However, they had opened by this time and we had to literally fight our way through the crowd which had jammed up the lobby. First though, we go to McDonald's and get some lunch. The food was terrible. We decided not eat there again. Then, we made our way to Radio Shack and buy a cable. We come back, it's the wrong type. So we call Pittsburg and tell them to send a cable. Meanwhile, people in the lobby are just rolling through like you wouldn't believe, all demanding Pizzas and they still have pizzas rolling out of the oven at the rate of 10 a minute and still can't keep up. We ask if they expected this, the Area General Manager (AGM) says "No, but we ordered a 3rd pizza oven", and we go to work on their Back Office. They say its still only showing pre-open job codes on their labor schedular instead of regular job codes. So we call Pittsburg and have them send a Job Code download. So, about this time, we decide we're tired and the DVP (Division Vice President) says he'll put us in his hotel. So we go to this super nice hotel and attempt to get some sleep. * Insert level up music here * * Insert Inn music here * Anyway, neither I or Brian (the guy who went with me) get much sleep because Brian snores really loud, so I'd wake up hearing "ZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!" so I'd go "Brian, quit snoring!", and he'd wake up and go back to sleep. Wait 10 minutes and repeat. Anyway, about 7:00 PM they call us saying the world is going to hell. We try go down there, but the main street we're going down is all jammed up with huge amounts of traffic. We conclude there must be a big city around somewhere. We make it to Pizza Hut, and they are so busy you literally can not pull in the parking lot. So we pull in to Popeye's next door and go inside. Their dispatch screen isn't showing any drivers. We go through the routine (this is a known issue), and find out they've been putting in new hires today. The problem here is whenever you change the POS (Point of sale, register) employee database it wacks out their delivery system. So they say "Ooops" and tell us they won't put them in anymore while they're open. We tell them they're going to have to live with it until EOD (End of Day). They also tell us their Labor Schedular is still wacked out, but we're really tired and tell them we'll deal with it in the morning. On the way out, we grab a free pizza (Large Meatlovers, stuffed crust. We also ask how big the town is. It's only 14,000 people but for some reason almost everybody in the entire county decides to jump in their cars cruise every day at about 5:30, jamming up the street for hours. Weird. We go back to our room and eat our pizza. We go through the snore routine again and at about 1:00 AM we give up and watch movies and Digimon the rest of the night (Why they run so much Digimon is beyond me). We go get some food at a convience store at about 7:00 AM at it really sucks too, just like the McDonald's food. We decide that all the food in this town sucks except Pizza Hut and that's why they're so busy. We go back to the store at 8:00 and doink with their Labor Schedular until noon, at which point we conclude that the program itself is messed up because it wasn't designed to hold so many employees. The program was only showing the first 28 (most Pizza Huts only employ 10 or so), and no matter what we couldn't get it to show the rest (This Pizza Hut employs 105). So we call in to Pittsburg and tell them to submit a level 2 escalation and just as we're about to leave at noon the DVP and AGM gang up on us and tell us to go Clarksdale (about 30 miles west) and fix them too. OK, fine, we're outta here. We're hungry, but decide not to get any food in Batesville since we don't want pizza and everything else sucks. We go down the highway till we get to Clarksdale and start messing with their computers. They've been having a super super super slow network, a problem which we eventually trace to a super fragmented hard drive on register 1 (their network server). It was almost completely full, and, I kid you not, 92% fragmeneted. We deleted some unneccesary files and started running Nortan Speedisk. We also found their t-bars (network equipment) were falling apart, we instructed them to buy new ones on Monday. We ate the salad bar while we there, and, 2 hours later, Speedisk was only 50% done defragging this 205 MB (Yes, that's megabyte) hard drive. So we're like, "We can't stay around till 5 PM waiting on this drive, we have to go home". So we leave them instructions on how to reboot everything when it's done and start home. * Insert level up music here * Anyway, Brian wants to see his relatives in Covington, Tennesse, and wants to know if we can go to Covington without going out of our way. I look at the atlas and calculate a new course and say yes. So we drive north to Memphis, TN, manage not to take any wrong turns this time, and continue north to Covington. We have a hard time finding the the house, but eventually, at 6 PM, we pull into his sister's house. She gives us Mt. Dew and tells us all embarrasing stores of Brian's childhood (among other things), then shows us the new house she's building (which is huge, but that's another story). Around 7:30 PM, we pull out, buy some Dr Pepper and Mini Thins (we were very very tired) at the convience store, and leave. An hour later, we about crash because we're falling asleep, so, despite having taken 630 mg of Effedrain each, we pull off and take a nap. I'm so tired I can't hear Brian snore :). * Insert Inn music here * At 10 we wake up, feeling very awake (that Effedrian must have kicked in). So we both pee on the ground since we're in the middle of nowhere and resume our journey. Later on we turn on to the Interstate, go across the Missisipi, which we can't see this time since it's dark, and about 12:15 we arrive in Seikston, Missouri. Brian comments he was born in this town as we pull into a convience store. He fuels up and I report to Pittsburg before they all go home. We get more Dr Pepper and some sandwiches (pre-packaged, wish they sold those in Batesville), and head out on the highway. We go over the Ozarks (up and down and up and down and up and down) and arrive in Springfield at about 4:30 AM. We refuel and head out fairly quickly on the Interstate. We get to Joplin at about 5:30 but don't stop, and just get off the Interstate and head straight to Pittsburg, KS. At 6 AM I finally get home, 3 days and 1100 miles after I left.