005
22.12.2003, 20:40 Uhr
0xdeadbeef
Gott
(Operator)
|
Noch eins:
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!"
--
Einfachheit ist Voraussetzung für Zuverlässigkeit.
-- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra |
