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.