[CH] Joke
Bloechl, Sharen Rund (sharen.rund.bloechl@lmco.com)
Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:24:17 -0700
Thought some may enjoy this. . .
A woman [Cindy] approached the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter asked for her
social security number. The woman told him, and Saint Peter typed on his
workstation:
pearly-gates:~/peter grep 212-53-6432 /earth/human/status
The computer responded:
212-53-6432 Cindy Smith cms@dragon.com!earth <mailto:cms@dragon.com!earth>
naughty pearly-gates:~/peter
Saint Peter then told her she was eternally damned, and that a minivan to
hell would be arriving shortly.
Cindy began to protest "but what did I do wrong? I loved my fellow neighbor
as I loved myself, I was a kind, warm, gentle person! Surely there must be
a mistake!"
So, Saint Peter looked up on the files, and saw, lo and behold that she
truly was a kind, warm, gentle person...until he saw the entry for Jan 7,
1992-earth, which read:
***DAMNABLE VIOLATION #69*** Posted irrelevant article to newsgroup.
After probing a little more, Saint Peter explained to the woman "It seems
that on January 7, 1992 you posted an article to Alt.religion.computers.
This article gave no praise of Emacs, no snide remarks toward Microsoft, and
not even a comment on the proper definition of 'hacker'! In fact, the
article was not even relating to computers at all, and discussed, of all
things, human religion! There wasn't even a reference to Bob or
Discordianism, Zen, or the Tao of programming. Oh dear, this is terrible."
"You see, heaven is a perfect place, and we only have room for the most
perfect people. Ever since we ran the T-3 line up from New Jersey we've
been particularly harsh on breakers of netettiquite. Didn't you read
RFC-23654? The one proposing commandments 11 through 15?"
He opened up an XTerm window and searched for some files. After a few
moments, the laser printer spat out a crisp sheet of paper. It read:
11: Thou shalt not flame spelling or grammar.
12: Thou shalt not have a .sig file longer than 3 lines. 13: Thou shalt not
send "All PC Users must die" messages to 19 random groups.
14: Thou shalt not request post a frequently asked question. 15: Thou shalt
not post to a group without first reading a week's worth of posts, thereby
avoiding irrelevant articles.
16: Thou shall not post administrative requests to the main list.
When she was done, she began to stammer, but Saint Peter stopped her, saying
"I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do. To register a complaint, you'll have
to send mail to status-change-request@godvax.heaven.com
<mailto:status-change-request@godvax.heaven.com> . We have a group of
cherubim who manage such requests. But be sure you don't send it to
status-change@godvax.heaven.com
<mailto:status-change-request@godvax.heaven.com> , otherwise your request
will be distributed to the whole mailing list. They *hate* that! In fact,
there's some discussion about making that the 16th commandment..."
At that point, a Dodge minivan drove up and came to a stop. Satan, in the
form of an IBM salesperson, stepped out. "Welcome!", she said. "We've been
waiting for you..." Cindy, almost in a trance, stepped into the minivan and
was whisked away to the netherworld, a world of COBOL, System 36's, punch
cards, incompatible network standards, and irresponsible news posters.
Satan turned to Cindy, and smiled. "You'll like it here", she said, "We
have netnews, but we've greatly simplified it. We have only one group, it's
alt.talk.sci.comp.soc.rec.misc!"
. . .B-)