Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

If you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 and haven’t heard the original 500-mile email story, you can read it at https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles.

(discussed previously on HN 5 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 – and 10 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708)

Even after reading the 2025 updated version, reading the original made me absolutely giddy at the end.

I can only imagine the euphoria of reconciling the inputs of “the things I know to be true of computers and email” and “my emails won’t send further than 500 miles”. What a great story - thanks for posting the original.

I collected a list of fun stories of this form a while ago!

- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt

- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

- The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining: https://predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-works-when-its-raining/

I once had a desktop computer that had great uptime, but started to consistently crash when I got up and left the room to get a drink of water.

Turns out it was old building with loose floorboards. The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply. As long as I sat my desk, it was fine.

But I had a co-worker who had a worse problem with getting up to get a drink of water. Once while she was kitchen, an eight foot steel lighting ballast came loose from the ceiling and felt right onto her chair.That what-if memory still haunts me.