The Gas Pump from Bizarro World

A story that would have been funny if I hadn't been in it:  we drove into the gas station, found an unoccupied pump, and I got out to fill'er'up.  And the game began.

1. "Credit/Debit/Pay inside?"  Credit.
2. "Credit is down.  Please wait."  [forever, it seemed]
3. "Credit/Debit/Pay inside?"  Debit.  [reluctantly]
4. "Credit is down.  Please wait."  Huh?  If I selected "debit", why would I care that "credit" is down?  Do you perhaps mean that "Debit is down" as well?  Would it kill you to say so?
5. "Credit/Debit/Pay inside?"  Inside.  [even more reluctantly]
6. "Please wait."  I wait.  And wait.  And wait.
7. "Replace nozzle."
8. "Sale timed out."
9. "Credit/Debit/Pay inside?"  The devil you say.  Okay, let's assume that "please wait" really means "go see the cashier right now."  Inside.
10. I go inside and report the problem.
11. "I'm sorry, nothing's working.  We can only take cash right now."

It would have taken maybe 34 bytes of code to have the pump say that, and avoid ticking off a potential customer with five wasted minutes of beating around the bush.  "Cash only at this time."  How hard is that?

If I'd been told up front what the system knew all along, I might have paid cash.  Instead I walked out to buy gas somewhere else.  There's no good reason to accept being given the runaround by a machine.

I'm a computer programmer.  Seeing a sloppy job like this POS terminal software really bugs me.  I don't know whether somebody failed to think about the code, or somebody failed to think about the cost of pressuring a coder to ship yesterday-if-not-sooner, but there is a price for either failure and it affects your bottom line, through your customers'.