Real technology

There's a wonderfully high-tech copier in this office, but for complicated reasons, the job I'm doing works better if you bypass some of its spiffy automated functions, and instead print one side of the document and then manually load those printed pages into the paper tray to print the other side.

It doesn't like this. It halts over and over to tell me there's a paper jam, but there never is one.

One of these days I want to see the people on sci-fi television deal with this technological reality. "Oh, it says it has a hyperdrive alignment error, but it really doesn't. You just have to open that green panel and count to four and close it again."