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Comment by Glyptodon | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of a family friend telling me a story about how last year they were on day trip somewhere and a power outage happened to occur in whatever one-shop town out in the boondocks they were visiting and only one old Grandma had cash to pay for a drink or snack while the power was out, everyone else basically had to starve through lunch waiting for the power to come back on.

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That's on the business. I used to be a cashier, and during power outages, we had an old carbon copier that we could use to copy credit cards and note the amount, and then enter it in manually later. You lose the instant approve/deny, but we'd also copy ids.

How did you copy licenses if the power was out?

> we had an old carbon copier that we could use

You know, the kind where you slide the thing across and you don't have to plug it in?

That takes an impression from a credit card (although I see more and more that don't have raised lettering) but not from an ID.

The impression isn't strictly necessary -- it's for convenience and, if needed, solid proof the physical card was there. At most you write down the license number on the carbon paper. If you lose the machine you can hand-write the card number just as easily.

Think about how an online transaction works -- punch in the number, no ID needed. Believe it or not that didn't start online ;)

Source: took "offline" payments when a retail store's power went down many many years ago.

You just write the relevant information on the carbon with a pen.

You're probably too young to remember, but back in the bad old days, we'd write stuff by hand. It didn't feel laborious because it was all we knew. We'd copy name, address, license number and expiration date, and eyeball that the person in front of us looked close enough to the picture.

Square also has an offline mode. I guess you could take photos of IDs with your phone's camera too.

My new card from Citi doesn't even have raised numbers. You could probably still write it down manually I suppose.

Hah. The last power outage in San Diego they lost vast amounts of food because none of the businesses could transact AT ALL. They no longer have backup systems that are unpowered.

So, even if you had cash, they couldn't take it.

That sounds silly. "Pen and paper" worked for many, many years and I guarantee that it can still work. What you're implying is that people couldn't add up the numbers?

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