I needed to verify a course result I'd completed about a year earlier. Not a complicated task: just pull out the printed certificate, scan the QR code, show the verification page. Except the QR code wouldn't scan. My phone camera hovered over it, flickered like it almost had something, and gave up. I switched apps twice. Same result. The third scanner app at least told me what it was struggling with: the code pattern was too damaged to resolve. The paper had been sitting in a folder for months. Heat, a few careless folds along the same crease, possibly some humidity. Whatever the combination was, it had degraded the printed ink in exactly the spot that mattered. The alignment squares in the corner were partly gone. The data modules through the center had faded to something barely darker than the paper itself. The QR code, which pointed to the course platform's official verification page, was functionally dead. The rest of the document was fine. My name, the course title, th...