Heaven...

The Loony Bin ( loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk )
Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:19:04 +0000


Hiya All...

Here's another tale explaining the workings of heaven...

Wishes & Dreams...

- ANDREA
        xx

*************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>*************
*****<ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>*****<bloodaxe@geocities.com>*****
***                                                 ***
***                 THE LOONY BIN                   ***
***           loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk          ***
*** Archive: http://eleceng.ukc.ac.uk/~pjw/loonies/ ***
***                                                 ***
*******************Internet Goddess********************
**********************ANDROMEDA************************

  ------- Forwarded foolishness follows -------


             NETNEWS: SERIOUS BUSINESS

A woman approached the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter asked for her
social security number.  The woman told him, and Saint Peter typed on
his workstation:

     pearly-gates:~/peter grep 212-53-6432 /earth/human/status

The computer responded:

     212-53-6432  Cindy Smith  cms@dragon.com!earth    naughty
     pearly-gates:~/peter

Saint Peter then told her she was eternally damned, and that a mini-van
to hell would be arriving shortly.  

Cindy began to protest. "But what did I do wrong?  I loved my fellow
neighbour as I loved myself, I was a kind, warm, gentle person!  Surely
there must be a mistake!"

So, Saint Peter looked up on the files, and saw, lo and behold that she
truly was a kind, warm, gentle person...until he saw the entry for Jan
7, 1992-earth, which read:

     ***DAMNABLE VIOLATION #69***
     Posted irrelevant article to newsgroup.

After probing a little more, Saint Peter explained to the woman, "It
seems that on Jan. 7, 1992 you posted an article to
alt.religion.computers.  This article gave no praise of Emacs, no snide
remarks toward Microsoft, and not even a comment on the proper
definition of 'hacker'!  In fact, the article was not even relating to
computers at all, and discussed, of all things, human religion!  There
wasn't even a reference to Bob or Discordianism, Zen, or the Tao of
programming.  Oh, dear!  This is terrible."

"You see, heaven is a perfect place, and we only have room for the most
perfect people.  Ever since we ran the T-3 line up from New Jersey we've
been particularly harsh on breakers of netiquette.  Didn't you read RFC-
23654?  The one proposing commandments 11 through 16?"

He opened up an XTerm window and searched for some files. After a few
moments, the laser printer spat out a crisp sheet of paper.  It read:

     11: Thou shalt not flame spelling or grammar.
     12: Thou shalt not have a .sig file longer than 3 lines.
     13: Thou shalt not send "All fags must die" messages to 19 random
         groups.
     14: Thou shalt not request post a frequently asked question.
     15: Thou shalt not post to a group without first reading a week's
         worth of posts, thereby avoiding irrelevant articles.
     16: Thou shall not post administrative requests to the main list.

When he was done, she began to stammer, but Saint Peter stopped her,
saying "I'm sorry.  There's nothing I can do.  To register a complaint,
you'll have to send mail to:

     status-change-request@godvax.heaven.com

We have a group of cherubim who manage such requests.  But don't send it
to:

     status-change@godvax.heaven.com

otherwise your request will be distributed to the whole mailing list.
They HATE that!  In fact, there's some discussion about making that the
17th commandment..."

At that point, a Dodge minivan drove up and came to a stop. Satan, in
the form of an IBM salesperson, stepped out.

"Welcome!" she said.  "We've been waiting for you..." 

Cindy, almost in a trance, stepped into the minivan and was whisked away
to the netherworld, a world of COBOL, System 36's, punch cards,
incompatible network standards, and irresponsible news posters. 

Satan turned to Cindy,and smiled.  "You'll like it here," she said.  "We
have netnews, but we've greatly simplified it.  We have only one group;
it's:

     alt.talk.sci.comp.soc.rec.misc!"