[ale] Bill Gates Joke

[Dan Newcombe]

Actually pulled this off an NT group...


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 =90was 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?"

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 in the beginning. 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 of a 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 =90ambrosia? 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 #23 and meet up with your occupational
 orientator. His =90name 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
centre #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six hour wait.

  "Heaven is centuries behind in building its data processing
infrastructure," explained =90Abraham. "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 realised 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 centre.
 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 backend 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 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. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the
miles of fiber 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 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 centre based on
 PCs running Windows, then........ GO TO HELL!"






--
Dan Newcombe                                      newcombe at mordor.clayton.e=
du
"The fool who escaped from paradise will look over his shoulders and cry...=
So
I'll hold my peace forever when you wear your bridal gown."   -Marillion