Summary

  • RFC 1438, dated 1 April 1993, is an Informational satire by Lyman Chapin and Christian Huitema. It invented IETF “Statements Of Boredom” for grave-sounding documents containing no useful information.
  • In the invented sequence, five reviewing bodies or figures examined the paper, everyone fell asleep, and the paper was discarded. The remaining vacuum supposedly had technical approval but could never become an Internet Standard. The joke tested what approval means when there is no artifact to use.

Imagine a document that has every ceremonial credential and nothing to tell the person running a network. RFC 1438 gave it a home. Its authors, Lyman Chapin and Christian Huitema, dated their two-page memo 1 April 1993 and named the fictional series “Statements Of Boredom,” or SOBs. A SOB would express deep institutional concern while carrying absolutely no useful information. The claim was the premise of a joke, and the target was a familiar institutional temptation: let the journey through committees stand in for the thing the document says.

The real machinery made the parody legible. RFC 1310 described a standards track with Proposed Standard, Draft Standard and Internet Standard stages, review by the community, and defined IETF, IESG and IAB roles. RFC 1410, published just before the joke, listed actual protocol standings. Those documents dealt in specifications and recorded maturity. RFC 1438 borrowed their vocabulary and then added impossible requirements: review by the IAB, IRSG, IESG, a “SOB Editor” named Morpheus and the Académie française; triplicate reproduction; translation into ASN.1; distribution to insomniacs.

The imagined approval rule was brutally efficient. Once every reviewer had fallen asleep, the paper was approved and discarded. The authors called the absence left behind a vacuum with technical approval, while denying it the status of an Internet Standard. The punchline separated three things an organization can blur: a document passing a ritual, a document containing a testable idea, and a standard that implementers can actually use. Their empty document completed the first and failed the rest by design.

Even the Security Considerations section kept the joke aimed at the process. It said security was not discussed and, in the same breath, that nothing important was discussed. That line punctured the appearance of a complete RFC template. A heading can be filled while the subject remains untouched. The form gives readers a place to look; it cannot manufacture the missing analysis.

The RFC's publication history is part of the irony. RFC 1438 itself exists as an Informational RFC that readers can inspect today. Its fictitious SOB process would destroy its own output. That reversal lets the joke make a serious editorial demand: keep the artifact. An approval claim should lead to a text, a decision, a test, or running code that someone else can examine. A vanished paper leaves only the prestige of the people who were said to review it.

RFC 1438 records no actual SOB subseries, approvals or discarded standards. Its two pages do show how early Internet engineers could laugh at procedure from inside the RFC system. The laughter had a precise target. When a process becomes an end in itself, it can produce a polished receipt for an empty box.