A short while later, emails from all over the country started pouring in, reporting that, alas, despite frantic searching, nobody in all those other cities had spotted the missing coffee mug anywhere inside their offices, each email again sent to every single email address in the company-wide email distributor. This went on until the IT department (located at the HQ) eventually stopped this little internal denial-of-service attack...
A short while later, we got an update from HQ that the missing coffee mug had been found. Happy ending!