Waiting on the memory to free up reminds me of an interesting (but totally unrelated) event that happened in my younger days. I was doing phone support on a Monday morning, when I got a call to terminate a runaway print job from the office next door. Fairly routine stuff. I went next door (this was pre-network), got on the computer there, killed the print job, and cycled power on the printer to flush the data. No big deal.

The woman I was working with thanked me, and mentioned that she had tried to take care of it herself. She actually sent the job the previous Friday, and, not knowing what else to do, she turned the printer off. She had been hoping that the report would (this is a direct quote) "drain away" over the weekend.

I accepted her thanks with a straight face (she didn't know anything about print spoolers and why the report was still in the computer for almost the entire print run [the printer having a memory buffer of about 256 bytes]) and walked away.

Me and the rest of the gang couldn't help laughing about it later, though, and talking about the "drain plug" that we might be able to install on newer printers.