From: Trey Harris

Here’s a problem that *sounded* impossible… I almost regret posting
the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks
at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect
the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make
the whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago
when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A
little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying
to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn’t display panic when speaking
to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department
like statistics. “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than
500 miles?”

“It’s not what I *think*,” the chairman replied testily. “You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”

“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. “And
you couldn’t send email this whole time?”

“We could send email. Just not more than–”

“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t
you call earlier?”

“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now.” Ri