A golden rectangle of sunlight trembled on the café terrace’s wet tiles. I’m Ostap, a scruffy dog with the expression of someone who has never approved of mornings, and I was waiting while my owner, Olena, bought coffee. She tied my leash to a light metal chair and disappeared through the door.

A gust of wind lifted an empty croissant bag from the next table. The paper wrapped gently around my muzzle and smelled of butter. I stepped back to investigate this gift from fate, but the chair slid after me. I took another step. It moved again, scraping the tiles with the determination of a waiter at closing time.

I decided to get away from the suspicious furniture more quickly. The chair sped up too. The bag covered my eyes, so I followed Olena’s scent straight toward the door. The chair swung sideways and became wedged in the entrance, leaving me outside, Olena inside, and the entire queue silently observing our family engineering project.

Olena asked me to back up. I obeyed, the chair slipped free, and the bag fell from my face. She untied the leash and found one croissant crumb inside it. She gave it to me. So the coffee was hers, while I got paid for moving the furniture. At last, the human payment system made sense.

Quiet confession: I don’t trust technology that glows more cheerfully than I do. One morning, Béatrice—a woman in her forties with long locs—came into the café and opened our app to trade her reward points for one cinnamon bun. Perfectly ordinary. Even I nearly relaxed.

Béatrice tapped “Redeem,” but the screen froze on a loading circle. She tapped again. And again. The register stayed silent, but the receipt printer suddenly woke up and produced six vouchers for a free bun. Then twelve. A ribbon of paper crawled from beneath the counter toward her boots.

I unplugged the register, but the printer had a backup battery—a personality trait nobody had requested. It kept printing. Béatrice lifted the paper so she wouldn’t step on it and began folding it neatly like an accordion. Each time her phone reconnected to the Wi-Fi, another six vouchers emerged.

At last, Béatrice switched her phone to airplane mode. The printer exhaled one final inch of paper and fell silent. I gave her the original single bun, and she wrapped it in the end of the endless receipt like a highly bureaucratic napkin. Her points had been deducted only once. Apparently, the technology simply wanted everything in writing.