[BITList] Off Topic ?

[John Feltham]

--  Bill Gates In 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, which was  
about the size of Massachusetts. There were millions of people living  
in tents. 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, finally, a staffer in his  
late teens approached him. The young man 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. "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 a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel  
who died in a car wreck at 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 St. Peter? Where are the pearly gates?"

Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. "It  
says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is  
that right?"

"Yes."

"Well do the math! When this St. Peter business started, it was easy.  
Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it  
by himself."

"But now there are over five billion people on earth. When God said to  
'go forth and multiply,' he didn't say 'like rabbits!' Ten thousand  
people die every hour, over a quarter-million a day. Do you think  
Peter can meet them all personally?"

"I guess not."

"You guess right. So he had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is  
the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. 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 eternity sitting on your bum 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 no. 23 and meet up with your occupational  
coordinator. His name is Abraham--and no, he's not that Abraham."

Bill walked to induction center no. 23 and 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. 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 multisegment fiber-optic network, all  
running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a  
gigabit channel. Fault tolerant, 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. Workers 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 nearly row-by-row, half a million...  
Macintoshes. .. all running Apple software! Not a PC in sight! Not a  
single byte of Microsoft code!

The thought of spending eternity using products he had spent his whole  
life working to destroy was too much for Bill.

"What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? Excel???  
Word???"

"You're forgetting something," said Abraham.

"What's that?" asked Bill plaintively.

"This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "If you want to build a data  
processing center based on PCs running Windows, then you'll have to go  
elsewhere!"


__._,_.___
ooroo


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