[558] in Humor
HUMOR: Bill Gates goes to Heaven
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Sun Nov 20 19:08:07 1994
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 1994 19:05:17 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 12:27:44 PST
From: Connie_Kleinjans@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
From many eager contributors.
- ---------------------------------------
Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven.
When he got there, he had to wait in the reception area.
Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were
literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with nothing to
do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks
while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd.
Booze and drugs were being passed around, fights were commonplace.
Sanitation conditions were appalling. All in all, the scene looked like
Woodstock gone metastatic.
Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, one of the
staffers approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens. He
was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in
large yellow lettering.
"Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been hte
voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. "My name is Gabriel and
I'll be your induction coordinator." Bill started to ask a question, but
Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm just a guy
from Philadelphia who died in a car wreck at the age of 17. Now give me
your name, last name first, unless you were Chinese in which case it's
first name first."
"Gates, Bill." Gabriel started searching through the sheaf of papers on
his clipboard, looking for bill's Record of Earthly Works. "What's going on
here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's Saint Peter?
Where are the Pearly Gates?"
Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then
Gabriel looked up in surprise. "It says here that you were the president of
a large software company. Is that right?"
"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 thing
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 through his paperwork some more, and
then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. 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!" He 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.- And 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 wiat.
"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. 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. Fulla 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 and went to Heaven's new data
processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger
than the Astrodome. Workment 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 PC's??" 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 PC's running Windows, then...
....GO TO HELL!"
