[throwaway account] A couple of years ago, my company (SEA) was bought by a private equity-based company that was assembling a portfolio of similar companies. The IT group got taken over by a competent yet overworked group in their main office (PHX.)
The remote IT group wanted to move everyone's computer to their windows VMs that were in their colo in PHX, which were managed (and presumably logged) out of a central management panel. From their point of view, this was a great solution. I was trying to get them to put a separate VM bank up locally, because of the speed of light delay (at least 15ms) that would be small but annoying.
I had convinced the remote IT people that this would be a good idea, and also the [PHX] CTO apparently thought it was a good idea, but my local 'location boss,' who used to run our company decided that I was just doing it to increase my power. (which was untrue, because I would be going back to just ENG and not IT after the transition.)
So, my boss cancels it and throws me under the bus to management at our new home office. It takes a couple of weeks, then the terminals that log into the remote hosts get installed. The speed of light is one of the constants of the universe, so the problem I mention immediately happens.
My location boss gets annoyed by the slow performance on his computer and, remembering that I'd said something about slowness, storms into my office and starts demanding that I fix the computers. I try and calm him down and tell him that there's no way to fix this without moving the terminals & vms closer together.
He calls up the remote IT folks and they agree with me. He, at his next trip down to HQ, starts slagging on me to anyone who'd listen. Various people at the new home office warn me about this, but there's really nothing I can do about it.
After some hilarity, I'm transferred to a project that was designed to fail so there can be paperwork justifying laying me off.
So that is another way the speed of light can have real-world consequences.
This is the biggest difference between academic and professional programming in a single pithy statement, from a paper that Knuth wrote.