[ed. note: during the comprehensive peer review of today’s BLOTT, UC#2 pointed out that this topic has been covered by other great works of art, including Beetlejuice, Defending Your Life, Saturday Night Live, and possibly Eraserhead, Caged Heat: Parking Ticket Lockup III, and Rocky XXVII. However, at this point, we’d already invested more than 45 minutes with this topic, so we decided to run it.]
WLBOTT recently landed to lucrative contract to manage both Heaven and Hell’s Waiting Rooms.
Heaven’s Contract
Contract Details
Twine Décor Clause: The waiting room must be decorated with at least 100 feet of high-quality, hand-spun twine at all times. Seasonal twine installations are required, including twine wreaths for the holidays.
Chickens for Comfort: A minimum of three live chickens must be present in the waiting room at all times to provide emotional support and entertainment for the souls waiting to enter heaven. The chickens must be well-behaved and trained in basic poultry etiquette.
Marx Clause: After seeing the white light and going through the tunnel, all souls will be greeted by a Groucho Angel.
Cosmic Comedy Hour: Twice daily, there will be a 15-minute stand-up comedy routine by a rotating roster of ancient philosophers, mythical creatures, and WLBOTT Elders, to keep spirits high while waiting.
Take-a-Number Machine: The take-a-number machine must dispense tickets made of biodegradable twine-paper, with humorous sayings printed on each ticket, such as “Patience is a virtue—especially here!” or “Live, Laugh, Love.”[2]
Heavenly Muzak Playlist: The background music in the waiting room will be Richard Clayderman on loop.[2]
Optional Halo Polishing: As an added service (and for an additional fee), WLBOTT will offer halo polishing while souls wait. Tipping is encouraged.
High Speed Wi-Fi: Free, high-speed Wi-Fi will be provided, powered by Google twine fiber optics, ensuring that souls can check their celestial social media while they wait.
[2] Oddly, these items were also required by the demons negotiating the Hell’s Waiting Room contract.
The Elders Celebrate the Awarding of the Contract
The Groucho Greeting
Welcome to Heaven!
The Proof of the Pudding: Heaven’s Waiting Room Under WLBOTT Management
Hell’s Contract
Also some tough negotiations…. I think my old boss from IBM was sitting with their team.
Waiting Room Contract for Hell
Twine Décor Clause: Demons are responsible for ensuring the twine decorations remains tangled and aesthetically unpleasing.
Infernal Comedy Hour: A couple of the Elders are taking a stand-up comedy class.
Take-a-Number Machine: Broken.
Queue Management: Demons are authorized to use light-hearted mischief to manage long queues, including telling darkly humorous jokes, engaging in twine-based tricks, and offering free “patience charms” that may or may not work. They will also go on and on about WLBOTT. It is hell, after all.
Eternal Dial-Up: The demons insisted on using Spectrum and issuing non-stop pop-ups. It is hell, after all.
Twine Warranty: A lot of “fine print”. If you ever signed up for a free trial of Disney+, you are out of luck.
Implementation
After Hours / After Life Comedy Club
The help pass the time (it feels like an eternity), the waiting rooms have a comedy club. You’ll be entertained by some of the world’s greatest thinkers.
Elder G gives us some of the best one-liners from the AfterLife club.
- Socrates: “I know one thing: that I know nothing… but at least I’m sure this crowd knows less!”
- Plato: “I used to think the world was just shadows on a cave wall, but now I see the light—turns out, it’s just the spotlight!”
- Aristotle: “Everything in moderation, including my jokes—don’t worry, they’ll only get moderately worse!”
- Descartes: “I think, therefore I am… funny! And if you disagree, are you even here?”
- Kant: “I’m not saying my humor is universal, but according to my categorical imperative, you should all be laughing!”
- Nietzsche: “God is dead… but I’m alive, and so are my jokes! Let’s give nihilism a reason to smile tonight.”
- Confucius: “Man who stands on hill with mouth open will wait a long time for roast duck… but man who laughs at my jokes is wise indeed!”
- Laozi: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single joke… and this one’s going to take us all the way to enlightenment!”
- Sartre: “Hell is other people… unless they’re laughing at your jokes—then it’s heaven!”
- Wittgenstein: “If a joke can be said at all, it can be said clearly; but if you don’t get it, that’s on you!”
- Marx: “Last night I dreamt I was a stand-up comedian… and then I woke up and realized the punchline was capitalism!”
- Camus: “Life is absurd, but my jokes? They’re the most absurd of all—laugh, or rebel against the humor, your choice!”
- Epicurus: “Why worry about death? It’s just like missing the punchline—if you’re not there, it doesn’t matter!”
- Hobbes: “In the state of nature, my jokes are nasty, brutish, and short—but in society, they’re just short!”
- Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom… kind of like trying to figure out if you should laugh at this existential joke!”
And the encore….
- Socrates: “I know that I know nothing… but I do know this crowd could use a little more wine!”
- Plato: “They say the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but have you tried the unexamined joke? It’s a real knee-slapper!”
- Aristotle: “Virtue lies in the mean… unless you’re mean to me, in which case, virtue’s going out the window!”
- Confucius: “Man who stand on toilet is high on pot, but man who sit on wisdom always rise to the occasion.”
- Diogenes: “I was looking for an honest man… but instead, I found a bartender with a great sense of humor!”
- Epicurus: “Pleasure is the greatest good—especially when it’s chocolate. Trust me, I’ve done the research.”
- Zeno of Citium: “You can’t step in the same river twice… but you can definitely slip on a banana peel twice if you’re not careful!”
- Pythagoras: “Triangles are the most stable shape… but nothing stabilizes a bad joke like a solid punchline!”
- Heraclitus: “The only constant is change… and the fact that nobody gets my jokes the first time around.”
- Laozi: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step… and ends with the realization that you’ve forgotten your punchline!”