  Exploring the topology of electronic bands is a way to realize new states of
matter with possible implications for information technology. Because bands
cannot always be observed directly, a central question is how to tell that a
topological regime has been achieved. Experiments are often guided by a
prediction of a unique signal or a pattern, called "the smoking gun". Examples
include peaks in conductivity, microwave resonances, and shifts in interference
fringes. However, many condensed matter experiments are performed on relatively
small, micron or nanometer-scale, specimens. These structures are in the
so-called mesoscopic regime, between atomic and macroscopic physics, where
phenomenology is particularly rich. In this paper, we demonstrate that the
trivial effects of quantum confinement, quantum interference and charge
dynamics in nanostructures can reproduce accepted smoking gun signatures of
triplet supercurrents, Majorana modes, topological Josephson junctions and
fractionalized particles. The examples we use correspond to milestones of
topological quantum computing: qubit spectroscopy, fusion and braiding. None of
the samples we use are in the topological regime. The smoking gun patterns are
achieved by fine-tuning during data acquisition and by subsequent data
selection to pick non-representative examples out of a fluid multitude of
similar patterns that do not generally fit the "smoking gun" designation.
Building on this insight, we discuss ways that experimentalists can rigorously
delineate between topological and non-topological effects, and the effects of
fine-tuning by deeper analysis of larger volumes of data.
