"Yes."
"Well then, do the math chip-head! When this Saint Peter business started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now there are over five billion people on earth. Jesus, when God said to 'go forth and multiply,' he didn't say 'like rabbits!' With that large a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?" "I guess not."
"You guess right."
So Peter had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual inductions." Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more, and then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment."
"Job assignment?"
"Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on your ass and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight around here!" Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. "Take this down to induction center #23 and meet up with your occupational orientator. His name is Abraham." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, he's not *that* Abraham." Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to induction center #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six-hour wait.
"Heaven is centuries behind in building its data processing infrastructure," explained Abraham. "As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries."
"I had to wait *three* weeks," said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven, it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. "Well," Bill offered, "maybe that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up."
Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. "Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing center. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers connected by a multi-segment fiber optic network, all running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works."
Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This is really Heaven!"
"We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the center now?"
"You bet!"
Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed. But the center was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers, arranged neatly row-by-row, half a million ....
.... Macintoshes ....
.... all running Claris software! Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code!
The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill. "What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? What about Excel??? What about Word???"
"You're forgetting something," said Abraham.
"What's that?" asked Bill plaintively.
"This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "We need a computer system that's heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs running Windows, then ....
.... GO TO HELL!"
There was a pilot flying a small single engine charter plane, with a couple of very important executives on board. He was coming into Seattle airport through thick fog with less than 10m visibility when his instruments went out. So he began circling around looking for landmark. After an hour or so, he starts running pretty low on fuel and the passengers are getting very nervous. Finally, a small opening in the fog appears and he sees a tall building with one guy working alone on the fifth floor. The pilot banks the plane around, rolls down the window and shouts to the guy "Hey, where am I? To this, the solitary office worker replies "You're in a plane." The pilot rolls up the window, executes a 275 degree turn and proceeds to execute a perfect blind landing on the runway of the airport 5 miles away. Just as the plane stops, so does the engine as the fuel has run out.
The passengers are amazed and one asks how he did it. "Simple" replies the pilot, "I asked the guy in that building a simple question. The answer he gave me was 100 percent correct, but absolutely useless, therefore that must be Microsoft's support office and from there the airport is just a while away."
MICROSOFT TESTER DIES TRAGICALLY AT HANDS OF "PAL"
REDMOND, Wa - The Microsoft Redmond Campus was rocked by tragedy today as Paul Fitzgerald, Test Engineer on the Windows NT Team, was brutally murdered in an apparently psychotic tirade by one of the "personalities" of Microsoft's latest operating system shell program, Bob. In the small hours of this morning, Java, the "friendly" coffee-drinking dinosaur, burst from the screen of Fitzgerald's computer, cutting a swath of destruction throughout the hapless worker's office and into the accompanying hallway.
The beast was quickly subdued by Microsoft Campus Security upon failing to produce a valid Microsoft keycard, avoiding what could otherwise have been a tragedy of much greater proportions. He is currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation at the Washington Institute for Perfectly Valid Lifeforms Who in the Heat of the Moment Do Some Absolutely Naughty Things. Says Lars Opstad, chief spiritual healer and concert pianist, "It's touch and go right now. I don't think Java yet realizes the immensity of what he's done."
`Eyewitnesses say that they could hear the stegosaur-like computer guide screaming "All I wanted was a GOOD espresso" in those terrible moments before dawn. Said Rover Retriever, another Bob personality, "This is just terrible. Java was always such a great guy. Sure, he was a little high strung, but I can't believe he would do something like this. I think we need to seriously re-examine the stress that the Bob Personality group is under so that another such incident doesn't occur."
A possible precipitant to the incident could be Java's recent attempt to quit smoking as a result of a clause in his contract. Lawyers are examining whether this constitutes a violation of discriminatory hiring statutes on Microsoft's part. Microsoft Legal could not be reached for comment, but an undisclosed source asserted "We couldn't have him puffing away like that. He's a dinosaur, not a dragon. It would confuse the market."
Coroner's reports say Fitzgerald died instantly of cardiac arrest, but are unclear on whether this was a result of the vicious attack or the fact that Bob installed successfully on NT.