Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

> there was a university president who couldn’t send an email more than 500 miles, and the wise sysadmin said that’s not possible, so the president said come to my office, and lo and behold, the emails stopped before going 500 miles.

NO. NO NO NO.

How can you get SO MANY facts wrong when the freaking story is googlable?

Here's the original email: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Here's the FAQ that covers the ambiguous parts: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

This annoys me because I know the original author and I remember when this happened (he told the story a few times).

Let's recap:

> there was a university president

NO! It was the chairman of the statistics department.

> who couldn’t send an email more than 500 miles,

True. Being in the statistics department he had the tools to make actual maps.

> and the wise sysadmin said that’s not possible, so the president said come to my office

Kind of true. There was an office involved.

> and lo and behold, the emails stopped before going 500 miles.

True.

> There’s a lot to the story that’s obviously made up,

NO! Zero of this story was made up.

ALL the people that were involved in the story are still alive. You can literally get them on the phone and talk to them. We're not debating whether or not Han Solo ever used a light saber. THIS SHIT REALLY HAPPENED.

Sheesh.

The whole tone of TFA is super frustrating. The original story is funny, well written, and, well, a story meant to be told "over drinks at a conference". TFA misses all the humor and generally seems to be written by a very bitter person.

I think the entire story was made up, but certainly the author admits much of it was made up.

> 4. If you are not 100% sure of the details, then why are there so many details in the story?

> Because with the details, the story looks much better. Do you really think that if I started each sentence with the words “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to be ...”, then something would have changed? In the end, at the very beginning, I warned that some minor details were changed, and some were intentionally omitted - just to make the story better.

> The second important point is the site where the story was first published. I sent this story to the SAGE (System Administrators Guild) mailing list in the "incredible challenges" section. These were just stories about the most incredible tasks that management sometimes puts to system administrators.

And let's not forget the the post ends with:

> I'm looking for work. If you need a SAGE Level IV with 10 years Perl, tool development, training, and architecture experience, please email me at trey@sage.org. I'm willing to relocate for the right opportunity.

Which I think was the true purpose of the (to me) made up story.