So, yesterday I was on a boring conference call and was zooming around Google Maps. At one point I zoomed out and then zoomed in and noticed that on the third level in the first city markers appeared on the map.

And some of them struck me as odd. Portland is there, but not San Francisco. Houston, Dallas and San Antonio but no New Orleans. No Miami, Atlanta, etc.

Anyway, then my brain wandered and I wondered which was the most remote of those few cities honored enough to be listed at the 3rd level of Google Maps zoom.

I can now tell you the answer is Darwin, Australia, at about 2619 km from the nearest listed city of Adelaide.

The two closest cities are Tallinn, Estonia, and Helsinki, Finland, at just 84 km away from each other (with Akita and Marioka Japan within the margin of error at 90 km).

You might think this is why they shouldn't put me on boring conference calls. You'd not be entirely correct.

Me being able to show my work is why they shouldn't put me on boring conference calls.

Hey! I can see my house !!

...and Darwin is the sort of place people emigrate to avoid. Well, that's my Darwinian theory, anyway.

Someone/something keeps calling me from an unknown number. I blatantly send it to voicemail. I suspect an auto-dialer.

Possibly a fax machine? We've had that before.

True story. One of our senior execs works only via fax. No email. Hard copy fax. So for a few years he'd sign stuff and send it back to his admin who never go it. I sent it, didn't get it, resend it.

After a few years of this he actually called the number that was printed on the top of the fax and found out it was someone's home in NJ. The admin had gotten a new fax machine and when she put in the parameters inverted two numbers. So he had been faxing to some poor guy in NJ's phone for two years. And at wacky hours since he's west coast.

Long before that I would have tried faxing the number the back telling them to knock it off.

But how many people still own a fax machine at home?

I do.

Lots of people at our company do - so as to be able to fax said exec. Our office has two.

An actual stand-alone machine or a computer? It doesn't matter to the conversation at hand, I'm just curious.