David Lawsky of Reuters, analyzing the Microsoft antitrust hearings before the European Commission’s Court of First Instance, comes up with the Worst. Metaphor. Ever.
The workings of what one might call “Chinese restaurant protocols” may help explain the importance of computer protocols.
Chinese restaurants deal with clients, who sit at tables waiting to eat while servers go from table to table taking orders and delivering food.
In the case of computer protocols, the clients are personal computers, operated by Microsoft’s near-monopoly Windows system. The PCs send requests to central computers, known as servers, to validate passwords, provide files and print documents, among other tasks.
Chinese restaurant servers, like computer servers, follow protocols—that is, rules and custom of interaction—in meeting the needs of the clients.
For example, clients are served in the order they came in, unless they have reservations. All clients at the same table want their meals at the same time.
Menu items may be designated by number as well as description, a familiar code to Chinese restaurant clients. Egg fried rice might be Number 18 and General Tsao’s Chicken Number 14.But if someone calling from home for take-out has an old menu, the code could be wrong. The old number 14 was sweet-and-sour pork, and the caller winds up with General Tsao’s Chicken.
About the only cliche he missed was a reference to wanting to access those files again an hour later. I had to check the dateline carefully to make sure it wasn’t April 1.
Ed Bott 
I now feel much, much better about the many times I used a “post office / message / envelope” metaphor to describe IP communication.