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 staff-
 ers 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 back-
 ground 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 infra-
 structure," 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???
 Whatabout 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!"