The Basic Plan

A quick, dashed-off post in between getting home from work and cooking dinner. I’m reading Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, a gift swap item to Zac from the lovely Nina. On the train home I was reading an entry that has a throwaway line about “God’s basic plan.” God in this case being the Christian god.

Maybe this is just me, but I hear “God’s basic plan” and I assume that the basic plan is like something from an online web service or a technology company, the lowest tier on a list of sexy-sounding options with a lot of little green checkmarks. Further tiers have names like “the deluxe plan,” “the small business plan” and “the enterprise plan.” Like this:

(From Freshbooks; incidentally I have just processed my first invoice through them and it all went swimmingly.)

And now I’m thinking, if that were true, why didn’t we go with the enterprise plan from the very beginning, with all the bells and whistles and upgrades? As I understand, in this religion we started as a single-user organization. But surely someone must have seen some room for growth there?

What would those upgrades have been? Supposedly we’re talking about the opportunity to upgrade the entire universe, starting with the human race. Increased baseline empathy? Maybe the ability to monitor and manipulate our own bodies on a cellular level. Intelligent group sorting. (Keyword is “intelligent.”) An evolutionary ability to process and integrate tools directly into the human physiology, with regularly released patches and updates. 24-hour helpline and live customer support would definitely have been one of them. None of this “leave a message and we’ll get back to you when you die” crap.

Maybe it’s that we expected God to check back with an option to upgrade (Upgrade: Revelation) but God never called and turns out to be terribly difficult to reach. Shoddy salesmanship.

Maybe it’s that God did call, but whoever picked up the phone thought it was a prank and hung up. Or maybe the call’s in the works for 2012. God, a bell-voiced, 30-something telemarketer with just the faintest hint of a Midwest accent calls up a house at random in a small town somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. A little boy answers the phone, which rings as he’s walking down the hall from his bedroom to the stairs to go outside and catch the bus; of course, God would call a child.

“Hello,” God says, “I’m calling from heaven to check in and see if you’d like to consider upgrading your plan from basic to enterprise. We’ve noticed from our records that you’ve grown a bit since the original installation, and thought we might be able to help with that.”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” says the little boy.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says God, and you can hear the smile in her voice. “I have you down as the authorized decision maker for this particular account. I just wanted to know if you’d like to make everything a little bit better.”

Lots of big words. The boy takes a minute to answer. “Everything?”

“Everything everywhere, yes. No payments up front, just say yes and we’ll start getting the extra features and updates out to you right away.”

The boy thinks about this. “Will that make my mom and dad better too?” he asks.

“Yes, if they’re standard users – and I see from my records here that they are – they’ll both receive instant upgrades in emotional intelligence and empathy, which will probably solve any problems they’re having in the next few weeks.”

“It doesn’t cost money?” the boy says. “Because we don’t have a lot of money.”

God smiles. “Right now, it doesn’t cost a thing.”

“Um, I guess okay then. Yes please.”

“Great. We’ll get that started this afternoon. Thanks so much for your time, Caleb, and have a great day.”

As the line clicks off the little boy thinks, I don’t think I told that lady my name was Caleb. But then he forgets about it and goes downstairs to get his bus to school.

Bam. Upgrade.