In the 90s, I worked in a little electronics shop where the owner had a "creative" scheme going. He would order all sorts of stock (cameras, computers, radios, etc) via cash-on-delivery (COD), but then he had a deal with the UPS man.
The UPS man would just keep all the goods in his truck for weeks and weeks. Then whenever we had a customer at the store who wanted to buy a given model of camera or whatever it was, I would be "dispatched to the stock room", aka, I would go out the back with cash in hand, get a money order from the post office next door, find the UPS truck (his turf was just a few city blocks), and then triumphantly come back with the item for the customer.
It usually worked well enough, but occasionally failed in unpredictable ways and sometimes spectacular ways. Like using a queue as a db -- that's not really how any of that was meant to work...
The UPS man would just keep all the goods in his truck for weeks and weeks. Then whenever we had a customer at the store who wanted to buy a given model of camera or whatever it was, I would be "dispatched to the stock room", aka, I would go out the back with cash in hand, get a money order from the post office next door, find the UPS truck (his turf was just a few city blocks), and then triumphantly come back with the item for the customer.
It usually worked well enough, but occasionally failed in unpredictable ways and sometimes spectacular ways. Like using a queue as a db -- that's not really how any of that was meant to work...