Bill Gates goes to Heaven
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, face scarred
with acne. 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 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 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 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."
"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!"