When Bill Gates died, he went up to Heaven, where Saint Peter showed him to his house;
a beautiful 20 room house, with grounds and a tennis court. Bill Gates was pleased, and
spent many months enjoying the amenities of Heaven. One day, he was enjoying one of Heaven's
many fine parks, when he ran into a man dressed in a fine tailored suit. "That
is a nice suit, my friend," said Gates. "Where did you get it?"
"Actually," the man replied, "I was given a hundred of these when I got here.
I've been treated really well. I got a mansion on a hill overlooking a beautiful hill,
with a huge five-hundred acre estate, a golf course, and three Rolls Royces."
"Were you a Pope, or a doctor healing the sick?" asked Gates.
"No," said his new friend," Actually, I was the captain of the Titanic."
Hearing this made Gates so angry that he immediately stalked off to find St. Peter. Cornering
Peter, he told him about the man he had just met, saying, "How could you give me a paltry
new house, while you're showering new cars, a mansion, and fine suits on the Captain of the
Titanic? I invented the Windows operating system! Why does he deserve better??!!!!"
"Yes, but we use Windows," replied Peter, "and the Titanic only crashed once."
An unemployed man goes to try for a job with Microsoft as a Lavatory cleaner. The manager there arranges for an aptitude test (Section: Floors, sweeping offices) After the test, the manager says: You will be paid $30 per day. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and advise you where to report for work on your first day.
Taken aback, the unemployed man protests that he is neither in possession of a computer nor of an e-mail address. To this the MS manager replies: Well, then, that really means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardly expect to be employed.
Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and only having about $10 he decides to buy a 10lb. box of tomatoes at the supermarket. Within less than 2 hours, he sells the tomatoes singly at 100% profit.
Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night. And thus it dawns on the man that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes.
Getting up earlier and earlier every day and going to bed later and later, he multiplies his hoard of profits in quite a short time.
Not too long thereafter, he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again shortly afterwards on a pick-up truck. By the end of the first year, he is the owner of a fleet of pick-up trucks and manages a staff of several hundred former unemployed people, all selling tomatoes.
Considering the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life assurance. Calling an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order that he might forward the documentation.
When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned: What, you don't even have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the Internet, e-mail and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would have been by now, if you had been connected from the very start!
After a moment's silence, the tomato millionaire replied: Sure! I would have been a lavatory cleaner at Microsoft!
Morals of the story:
The Internet, e-mail and e-commerce do not need to rule your life.
Get e-mail, if you want to be a lavatory cleaner at Microsoft.
If you don't have e-mail, but work hard, you can still
become a millionaire.
Seeing that you got this story via e-mail, you're probably
closer to becoming a lavatory cleaner than you are to
becoming a millionaire.
If you do have a computer and e-mail, you're already
being taken to the cleaners by Microsoft.
At a recent software engineering management course in the US, the participants were given an
awkward question to answer. "If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your
team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software how many of you would
disembark immediately?"
Among the ensuing forest of raised hands, only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would
do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay onboard.
With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway,
let alone take off.