They can be... especially if employer doesnt have a budget to buy new or upgrade an obsolete system
I think the most frustrating was a tight $10,000 a year POS budget and getting by with 7 year old POS systems that run 24/7/365 with 9 hours idle time and 15 hours run time. Had a failure rate of about 1 system a week dying due to hardware being run into the ground. I ended up having to buy POS systems and Epson printers on ebay for parts to mix and match to have some spares to swap in. When unable to get parts on ebay I was buying good used hardware through Xerxes which is now TDX Tech.
We had 32 registers across 4 Point of Sale locations. 2 Gas Stations had a copperlink TUT modem 1.2MBPS bridges to main store that was 2 miles from it by renting a copper pair from Telephone company under "Burglar Alarm Circuit" is what we told them we needed this way it was a copper pair that was direct point to point and a low cost secure network bridge over a 1.2/1.2 connection for each bridged location and cheaper than VPN over an ISP.
Also had my wrist slapped by New Hampshire DOT for swapping out a printer on a NHOST Automotive Inspection system that gives pass/fail info to state DOT database. Inkjet printer in a garage bay with brake dust and grime lasted 4 months and died. Called for them to come out and service it and they said it wont be until next day. The garage needed to print peoples inspection paperwork and the Kiosk type of system that the NHOST was wouldnt allow you to do anything until printer was satisfied. I went to walmart and bought a $30 Lexmark and back at my office I made an autorun CD to give me CMD prompt. From command prompt I had admin control of NHOST kiosk and was then able to install the Lexmark driver since the printers driver disk required you to run setup and didnt have an autorun to it. Next day the state sent out some "Qualified" tech to service it and he saw them inspecting cars using the Lexmark inkjet and well I was given a phone call to come down to garage. Got down there and guy was saying that I have no right to hack their system. I said I didnt hack their system, I said we have customers that need cars inspected and if your too slow to get here to fix it I will fix it myself. He asked how I gained control to install drivers. Told him that Autorun is a powerful feature, he grinned and said he didnt know they were vulnerable to that and gave me the Lexmark back and installed a new Epson Stylus like the other one that failed. I then said here is an idea... give us a spare Epson so if this happens again I can swap it out and not do the unauthorized printer installation as admin to keep customers happy. I explained that customers are not happy when they go to get an inspection that is scheduled and turned away due to a dead printer. He called his boss and he said sure given that I was going to do the lexmark trick again if we were in same situation and they wanted me to stay out of admin mode of the NHOST Kiosk, so I was then able to swap them out as they got gunked up with brake dust and other grime from 3 garage bays. And the guy then just come by and pick up the gunked up printer and deliver a clean one as the next spare.
