Build a skyscraper, and lock the keys inside for the ribbon cutting. Sorry pal you lost your funding
Land on Mars, see an alien, but your camera is out of batteries and everybody back on Earth thinks you're a quack.
Successfully perform open-heart surgery on a desert island, but muck up the stitches and cause a scar. Your patient will hold it against you the rest of his life (which you saved).
Here's a soul-crushing situation that doesn't have a workaround, as far as I can tell.
You can play the original Deus Ex on OnLive. By default, it sets the fov to a very low number. It's only possible to change it in the console (there is no UI for it). But the console is disabled. However, you can get around that by pressing T, which creates a mini console with "say " prepoulated. Press delete to erase say, and type "fov 90". So close...
But they disabled the Enter key from working.
So you can get full access to the console, type the command that would fix the FOV, but you're unable to execute it because Enter key does not get sent to the game. You're completely helpless.
OnLive Client <-all input is transmitted-> OnLive Servers <-filter out Enter-> Deus Ex instance in a VM.
The enter key is filtered out on their servers. Unless you hack into their servers and change that, there is nothing you can do on the client-side. That's what makes you completely helpless.
Simple defects where a key is being ignored on certain systems are usually quite easy to fix ;)