On my first day at work in heaven, it quickly became clear that, logistically speaking, there was some overdue maintenance to be done.
I reported to the Golden Gate at eight o’clock. Peter sat behind a wooden table with an enormous book in front of him. Beside him was a quill in a small pot.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Name?”
“Arie.”
He leafed through the book.
“You’re not in here.”
“That’s right. I’m here to work.”
He looked up.
“Work?”
“Logistics.”
He looked behind him at a queue that disappeared somewhere behind a cloud.
“Then you’ve come at exactly the right time.”
I thought so too.
The problem was actually quite simple. Everyone who died arrived at the same gate. Without an appointment, without a time slot and, as far as I could determine, without any form of capacity planning.
“How many arrive on average each day?” I asked.
Peter shrugged.
“Varies.”
“Do we have historical data?”
He pointed at the book.
I looked at the book.
“Excel?”
“No.”
“Atlas?”
“No.”
“A dashboard?”
He looked at me as though I were the one who had just died.
By quarter past eight, I had seen enough.
“This has to change.”
At nine o’clock, there were six signs.
QUEUE 1 — SINNERS
QUEUE 2 — DIED OF OLD AGE
QUEUE 3 — FAILED TO PAY ATTENTION WHILE DRIVING
QUEUE 4 — INCOMPETENT DOCTORS
QUEUE 5 — DIED TOO YOUNG
QUEUE 6 — EVERYONE ELSE
It worked immediately.
Until a 96-year-old man joined queue 2.
“Have you sinned?” I asked.
He looked at his shoes.
“What do you mean by ‘sinned’?”
“Queue 1.”
“But I’m 96!”
“That may be, but sin takes priority over age.”
That gave us our first business rule straight away.
I wrote it on a piece of cardboard:
IF MORE THAN ONE CATEGORY APPLIES, SIN TAKES PRIORITY.
God stopped by to have a look.
“Nice,” He said.
“Thank you.”
“Isn’t that a little strict?”
“You hired me to handle logistics.”
“Fair enough.”
The next problem was admission.
Until then, people would walk up to Peter, Peter would look up their name, ask a few questions, look thoughtfully upwards and then make a decision.
Average processing time: seven minutes.
Completely unacceptable.
I had a spot painted on the ground in front of the gate.
Above it went a sign.
ADMISSION PROCEDURE
Stand on the spot. You will be weighed.
🟢 GREEN — Proceed to the Golden Gate.
🔴 RED — Join the back of the queue.
🟠 ORANGE — Wait until the light has gone out. Another train may still be coming.
Peter read the sign twice.
“What train?”
“No idea.”
“Does a train run through here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then why does it say that?”
“Because otherwise people go through on orange.”
He nodded slowly.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Logistics is the same everywhere, Peter.”
At eleven o’clock, the first bottleneck occurred.
A married couple had stepped onto the spot together.
The system showed red, green and orange at the same time and then started beeping.
I pulled the plug.
Ten minutes later, there was an extra sheet of A4 paper:
NO MORE THAN ONE DECEASED PERSON ON THE SPOT AT A TIME.
“That wasn’t there before,” the man said.
“That’s why it’s there now.”
By lunchtime, things were running quite nicely. Queue 3 turned out to be surprisingly busy. Queue 4 was shorter, but there was considerably more discussion.
“I was a surgeon,” someone said indignantly.
“I can see that.”
“I helped thousands of people.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“Then why am I here?”
I looked at my list.
“Wrong knee.”
He fell silent.
“Queue 4.”
We handled queue 5 differently.
No forms. No spot. No queue.
Peter went over there himself.
Something had already been agreed separately about queue eleven. But that is another story.
Some processes should not be optimised.
At three o’clock, God came by again.
He looked at the six queues, the spot, the traffic light and Peter, who by then was walking around with a scanner.
“And?”
“Processing time reduced by 63 per cent.”
“Nice.”
“Margin of error almost zero.”
“Wonderful.”
“Only queue 1 is building up.”
God looked at the enormous queue.
“Can we open a second gate there?”
I looked at Him.
“You should have said that sooner.”
The next morning, there was a second entrance beside the Golden Gate.
GOLDEN GATE 2 — ONLY SINNERS WITH NO MORE THAN THREE MINOR OFFENCES
COVETING COUNTS.
Peter thought it was wonderful.
Even the big book had disappeared. By then, we had built a simple system: HeitOS Celestial. Nothing complicated. Name in, category added, spot, light, gate.
At first, God wanted to add artificial intelligence.
“Not needed,” I said.
“Why not?”
“If someone is 96, has been married three times, has evaded taxes and has driven into a tree at 140 kilometres per hour, I know where he should stand without AI.”
“Queue 1?”
“Exactly.”
By the end of the week, heaven’s gate was running like clockwork.
No more bottlenecks. No more deceased people going missing. Peter had time for coffee and God automatically received a report every morning.
Received yesterday: 164,382
Green: 91,204
Orange: 48,117
Red: 25,061
Average processing time: 2 min. 14 sec.
Trains observed: 0
No one asked about that last item.
That seemed sensible to me.
Some procedures exist not because they make sense.
They exist because, at some point, someone simply went through on orange.
And even in heaven, they now know:
that’s where all the trouble starts.