A regular tetrahedron is the densest configuration for the packing of four equal spheres. The dense random packing of hard spheres problem can thus be mapped on the tetrahedral packing problem. It is a practical exercise to try to pack table tennis balls in order to form only tetrahedral configurations. One starts with four balls arranged as a perfect tetrahedron, and try to add new spheres, while forming new tetrahedra. The next solution, with five balls, is trivially two tetrahedra sharing a common face; note that already with this solution, the fcc structure, which contains individual tetrahedral holes, does not show such a configuration (the tetrahedra share edges, not faces). With six balls, three regular tetrahedra are built, and the cluster is incompatible with all compact crystalline structures (fcc and hcp). Adding a seventh sphere gives a new cluster consisting in two "axial" balls touching each other and five others touching the latter two balls, the outer shape being an almost regular pentagonal bi-pyramid. However, we are facing now a real packing problem, analogous to the one encountered above with the pentagonal tiling in two dimensions. The dihedral angle of a tetrahedron is not commensurable with 2 π ; consequently, a hole remains between two faces of neighboring tetrahedra. As a consequence, a perfect tiling of the Euclidean space R is impossible with regular tetrahedra. The frustration has a topological character: it is impossible to fill Euclidean space with tetrahedra, even severely distorted, if we impose that a constant number of tetrahedra (here five) share a common edge.