Thursday 12 June 2008

"If The Rapture's Today, Someone Grab My Steering Wheel Blackberry…!"

A new internet service allows Christian subscribers to send emails to non-believing friends and relatives after they have died.

Youvebeenleftbehind.com offers users a facility to store emails and documents that are sent to up to 63 email addresses six days after the sender and fellow believers have been transported to Heaven.
Wow, the ingenuity of some people when it comes to rooking their fellow human beings never fails to astonish me. The enterprising chap behind this is Mark Heard, a 49-year-old supermarket shelf-stacker from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
He said he got the idea in 1999 while trading in shares online. It suddenly occurred to him that he would not be able to send his trading password to his wife if the Rapture suddenly took him, he said.

Membership costs $40 (£20) a year but Mr Heard would not reveal how many people had signed up.
A lot, I suspect. Although since the article doesn’t describe him as a ‘former supermarket shelf-stacker’, perhaps business isn’t as brisk as he’d hoped. So, how’s this supposed to work, then? Well:
Recognising when the Rapture has actually happened is obviously an issue for the email server.

The service will be triggered if any three of Mr Heard's five employees fail to log on to their work accounts for six days.

"We don't want these things to go out early," said Mr Heard.
Quite! Although I suspect it’s a little naïve, though touching, that Mr Heard expects to employ the kind of staff that would naturally be taken up in the Rapture…
Randy Maddox, a theology professor at Duke University, was sceptical.

He told ABC News : "In one sense, they're arguing it will be a time of great disaster, but in another sense he's saying, 'I promise my website will be working'.

There are logical incongruities with the model."
I guess ‘sceptical’ is newspaper-speak for ‘rolling around the floor, laughing hysterically and crying ‘Stop! Please, no more, it hurts my ribs’..’.

Good luck to you, Mr Heard. You've brightened my day, at least...

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