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Bill Gates Goes to HeavenDan
Knight
2001.06.04Here's a tale we originally posted on LEM back in 1997
and somehow lost as we moved from server to server. It's a personal
favorite.
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.
Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until one of the staffers
finally approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens,
face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words
TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow letters.
"Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the
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 named
Gabriel. Now give me your name, last name first."
"Gates, Bill."
Gabriel started searching though 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."
"Heaven is decades behind in building its data processing
infrastructure," explained Gabriel. "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 then, do the math. When Saint Peter 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 six billion people on
earth. 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. Peter had to franchise the operation. Now he's the
CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate
headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual
induction."
Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more and 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
around and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to
pull your weight."
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.
"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 ever - a half million computers connected by
a multisegment fiber optic network, all running into a backend 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 really is 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.
The center was dominated by the computers - a half million
computers, arranged neatly row-by-row, a half million Macintoshes, each
running FileMaker Pro and
AppleWorks.
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, you'll have to go to Hell."
- <back to the
original article>
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