“Password?” came the booming Voice, which appeared to emanate from swirling white clouds around the gates that I stood up to my knees on a cloud in front of.

“Password?” I asked, puzzled.

“Password!” insisted The Voice.

“Pardon?” I am still confused.

“No, that won’t do at all,” The Voice sounded quite pissed off. “Didn’t they tell you that your password must be made up from letters, numbers and other characters, the ones I call the squiggly bits?”

“No. Nobody said nothing about a password.”

“Damnation! Nobody does what they are supposed to any more! Right, name?!”

“Russell Charles Atkins,” I recited, “Usually known as ‘Charlie’.”

“You’re not on my list.” The Voice, wherever it was coming from, sounded exasperated.

“Ah. Is that a good or bad thing?”

“What do you think?” Now The Voice bordered on petulance.

“I dunno, I don’t even know where I am,” I said, “Ornate and shiny double gates in front of a misty river, warm orange red sky above the far shore. Puffy clouds that appear to be talking to me and swirly mists that I appear to be standing on as if they are solid ground. Where the hell am I?”

“Well, Customer, Mr Russell Charles Atkins, what does this scene bring to mind?”

“The Pearly Gates?” I guessed.

“Do they look pearly to you?” The Voice asked, with a degree of petulance.

“No they don’t,” I replied, “What worries me more is what looks like a boat in the clouds, like the one that carries souls over the River Styx.”

“Oh! Classical scholar, then, are we?” The Voice snorted.

“No, I mend roads, put out ‘men at work’ signs, and general hard graft, or I used to before I retired last year; it’s just that we had ‘Jason & The Argonauts’ on Betamax at home when I was younger, for the kids; I sat with them and watched it a lot.”

“Well, there’s no more Pearly Gates or River Styx, every mortal person who dies comes through here first now. We’ve all gone PC, I’m not St P... , well, I’m not who you think I used to be any more, I’m referred to as ‘Human Reception’ now. No saints or angels or devils here any more. You are now a Customer, not a Sinner. Your password accesses the new processing system which determines where you go from here, up or down or in between.”

“Well, nobody gave me a password.”

“Mmm, let us go back to the end—”

“The end, don’t you mean the beginning?”

“Let me put it this way, Customer, what’s the very last thing that your mortal memory remembers?”

“Well, there I was walking to the shops to collect my pension, a bottle of milk and a newspaper, then looking up to see a piano swinging into a third floor window, thinking it’s all right, it’s only unlucky to walk under a ladder ... Next thing I know I’m standing here like a bloody lemon in front of your not-so-pearly pearly gates.”

“Mmmm,” The Voice sounded somewhat cautious all of a sudden, “Are you a test?”

“What’d’yer mean, am I a test?”

“Someone testing how we’re implementing the new system, because this all sounds like a blessed set-up to me.”

“What new system?”

“New entry program ... Upstairs imposed it on us very recently and Downstairs had to go along with it, everything’s changed and we’re still learning the blessed thing.”

“How’s it work?”

“First of all, you have to make up a password—”

“Open sesame!” I suggested.

“What?” The Voice snapped.

“My password. I just made it up.”

“No, deary me, Customer ... Mr Atkins ... please, you are really trying my blessed patience here. You have to pre-arrange your password with your ‘Official Human Handler’, at the point of your demise. Your ‘Official Human Handler’ then enters your password into the system with a hand thingy he carries. Beats me why in this new PC world we have to replace a single blessed word like ‘angel’ with three blessed words for the same blessed thing. But then I was never consulted on the new system. I liked the old system, but they tell me that I’m old school. Anyway, no hand thingy means no password, and no password equals no entry beyond this point.”

“I’ll just wait here then, while you sort it all out,” I said, after all it wasn’t like it was my fault their so-called ‘blessed’ system was total bloody rubbish.

“You can’t wait, Mr Atkins, you’re holding up the queue.”

I looked behind me, no queue. No one, no nothing at all. A few clouds, maybe, far off in the distance, but definitely no queue behind me.

“I can’t see no queue.” I told The Voice, with an element of challenge. I was fast becoming one dissatisfied Customer.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” The Voice was really getting tetchy, now, “Mr Russell Charles Atkins, who prefers to be called Charlie.”

“Why wouldn’t I see a queue, Mr Human Reception, formerly known as St P?” Two can play at that game.

“Say you were ISIS or the Taliban and you’d blown yourself up in a crowded marketplace; would you want to see the housewives, traders, passers-by and other victims immediately behind or in front of you in the queue, and them to see you with the remnants of a suicide pack across your shoulders?”

“No, I guess not.”

Just then a thin weedy chap appeared from nowhere and stood beside me.

“I got here first, mate!” I said, forcibly, establishing my claim, “Ok mush?”

So much for the bloody individual queue arrangement, it was more rubbish than the bloody new entry system.

“I’m your Official Human Handler Operative, sir, you were too quick for me.”

“Jesus Christ!” The Voice snapped, “Not three words to replace one, but now it’s four! Heaven help us!”

“What do you mean, ‘too quick’?” I said, ignoring The Voice. “No, I bloody well wasn’t too quick. ‘First’ I was walking along minding my own business, then, ‘Second’, I was standing here. I didn’t see you for diddly bloody squat, so don’t give all that ‘I was too quick for you’, mate. I reckon you were too bloody slow for me.”

“Whatever. You need to make up a password, Russell Claude Atkins, consist-”

“Wrong!” came The Voice, “This is not Russell Claude Atkins but Russell Charles Atkins - you cocked up, Official Human Handler Operative. And this isn’t the first time that’s happened with other Operatives lately, under this new blessed system.”

“Impossible, he’s the only Russell Claude Atkins in the system,” said the Handler, “I double checked.”

“Tried searching with wildcards?” asked The Voice in that superior tone that I guess comes naturally to it.