Out-of-order packet delivery

When we received a recent note from "Natasha" where she asked to be removed from her duties, we were confused because we could not conceive that given the time between her escape and the note that she thought we hadn't found out what had happened, especially since her new husband had already contacted us.  At the GNU Public Dictatorship, however, we are nothing if not resourceful, which is why we investigated it in depth.  As it turns out, the GNU Public Dictatorship usually uses a mail system based on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which is both reliable and guarantees in-order delivery of messages rather than one based solely on IP (Internet Protocol) which makes no such guarantees.  Our mailmen usually use various mechanisms to re-send lost messages and to route the messages in such a way that they arrive in a timely manner, but sometimes the mail system is down and messages must be sent using traditional couriers.  In this case it appears that a courier took "Natasha's" message on a rather large detour through the steppes of central Asia and got stuck in customs before being re-routed to our headquarters, but because "Natasha" had requested in-order delivery we didn't initially suspect that it was clearly not received in the order in which it was sent.  "Natasha's" message actually originated a few minutes after she escaped from the reality simulator, which makes a lot more sense.  It just goes to show that we can't always take everything at face value!