The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Thu, 7 Nov 1996 11:38:02 +0000
Hiya Loonies...
Once again we see Bill Gates no longer among the living...
Wishes & Dreams...
- ANDREA
xx
*************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>*************
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*******************Internet Goddess********************
**********************ANDROMEDA************************
------- Forwarded foolishness follows -------
_________________________________________________________________
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.
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. Come on, 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 ....
.... Power PC's ....
.... all running Mac/OS! Not a Intel 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 operating system that's
heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based on
PCs running Windows, then ....
.... GO TO HELL!"