PASS IT ALONG |
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A
Thought for Today
The guarantee for finding sanity is finding love again.
Sorry this is being posted so late today - a
couple of communication problems to end the week!
Today's piece is one of those things that was doing the rounds a few years ago and I think
it's worth repeating. Hope it makes all the geeks smile.
Rod will be back with you tomorrow.
- Ken, Johannesburg, September 3
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, 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 co-ordinator." 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 centre no. 23 and meet up with your occupational
co-ordinator. His name is Abraham--and no, he's not that Abraham."
Bill walked to induction centre 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 centre. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a
million computers connected by a multisegment fibre-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 centre now?"
"You bet!"
Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing centre.
It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workers were
crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fibre optic cables properly installed.
But the centre 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 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 centre based on PCs running Windows, then you'll have to go to HELL!"
--Author unknown |
