We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

The following was my variant on this from a few years ago, representing the 56th IETF PKIX meeting minutes. Note that this is from the book form, not the film version of the text: -- Snip -- We were somewhere in San Francisco on the edge of the 56th IETF when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should take notes...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge OIDs, all swooping and screeching and diving around the RFC, which was about a hundred pages long. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! Where are these goddamn business cases?" Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer into his mouth, to facilitate the PKI standards-creation process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the neon lights with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It.s your turn to figure out the interop requirements." I hit the brakes and dropped the Great Pile of Paperwork at the side of the room. No point mentioning those OIDs, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. We had two bags of X.509 standards, seventy-five pages of PKIX mailing list printouts, five sheets of high-powered constraints, a saltshaker half-full of vendor hype, and a whole galaxy of requirements, restrictions, promises, threats... Also, a quart of OSI, a quart of LDAP, a case of XML, a pint of raw X.500, and two dozen PGPs. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into a serious PKI RFC binge, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the X.500. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an X.500 binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. -- Snip -- Peter.