Sometimes I work on the edges of programming scripts and the standards and protocols needed to get a device and a script to talk to each other. Most of the time I just use them. I tell my Mini application to honk my car’s horn so I can find it. The code in my phone would send a message to my device, which is my car.

There is a protocol that both the phone and the car device use. The protocol says what to do if the device gets the message (Honk) and also how to explain itself if there’s a error performing the required action (Car horn currently disabled.).

On April Fool’s day in the 1990s someone created a very detailed protocol, a Hypertext protocol, for a different type of device — not a car but a coffee pot. Not broad humor. Subtle humor.

I mean, here you go, see how detailed it is.

It was an April Fool’s joke, and I think also a reference to the famed Trojan Room Coffee Pot I encountered in the ‘90s.

The best part is that every error is identified. Say my phone tries to contact my coffeepot to tell it to “BREW,” and if brewing does not begin, the device needs to send back the reason it cannot brew. Pot not closed, no water in pot, etc.

Each error has a number. It’s just like when you try to get to a web page that is gone, and instead of sending back the latest post it sends you a page that says Error 404, Page not found.

The Coffee pot protocol is designed to send back my new favorite error: Error 418, I am a teapot.

Sadly, some people want to use the lighthearted error number 418 for legit reasons, and they want to change the I am a teapot error code.

Here is the reference in Google’s offical list of error codes.

418 I’m a teapot

The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot status response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503. This error is a reference to Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol defined in April Fools’ jokes in 1998 and 2014.

While originally defined in RFC 2324 as an April Fools’ joke, this status code was formally reserved in RFC 9110 due to its wide deployment as a joke, so it cannot be assigned any non-joke semantics for the foreseeable future.

Some websites use this response for requests they do not wish to handle, such as automated queries.

There was a time when I designed a database, so now I am really fighting the urge to have some key combination like Control-t-p generate error 418.

Wisely, the Powers That Be have taken the edit rights to that database away from me.