The march of atoms is sometimes a novel change from directing the flow of bits as objects were hashed into banker boxes, moved via UDP to the truck whose packet size was about 600 cubic feet.  The routing protocol used was hardcoded with no QoS as the path didn’t change but there was some traffic shaping in that jumbo frames weren’t accepted after 5 PM.  Once in the condo building, we switched to TCP and Peter managed the SYN, ACK, SYN/ACK three-way handshake which allowed us to avoid packet collision.

The analogy does eventually break down though as no level of the TCP/IP stack has to deal with being told to die in a car crash for not donating bandwidth to a lost payload but nor can any specific layer know the joy of a handmade vanilla malt.