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Chapter 12 - Servant of God Jeffery Preston Besos
THE STORY OF DEL - Delete
Chances are that if the motor had been running on fossil fuels, he might've heard something, turned, and seen it coming. But the damned car made about as much noise as a junkyard refrigerator.
It wasn’t fair! Un-doodoo! The impact on Del's body was catastrophic, like a meteor landing on a bag of potato chips. The only three parts of him miraculously left unscathed were his hands, eyes and iPhone.
For long months, the beeps on the life support systems attached to his splintered remains would abruptly flat-line and issue jarring acoustic alarms that had medics, nurses, and organ harvesters scrambling to his bedside.
But each time, with a rattle and a moan that stubborn clump of cells called Del would pull through. Father Oregano, who ran the hospital's Catholic chapel, was already calling it a miracle.
The only problem was finding the holy person responsible for Del's prodigious survival. What happens when major miracles - obvious miracles - take place, but are left unclaimed and/or unattributed? Father Oregano was granted permission to search through Del's personal effects for clues to the still anonymous benefactor and was pleased no end when he found the name of a certain Jeffery Preston Bezos who had promised to look after Del's future and cover all contingencies.
The good priest duly took note and sent the information to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints. 'Servant of God Jeff Bezos' had a nice ring to it!
THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph...
THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Hi Del, how are you feeling today?" "Still kicking, Juula." "Where were we?" "You were talking about the 4 main reasons for bothering to select text, which on handhelds, is mostly done by dragging mini-handles - a real bummer." "Right. For writers and scribes, it represents the biggest design fail of all times. Sadly foisted on humanity by the greatest design genius of all times." Minihandles! - Yecch! "All right, let's focus on deletion. Remember this?" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox Christmas "Yes." In the preparatory "selection" phase, before effectuating the obvious deletion, it becomes this:" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox →Christmas "What do you notice?! "For deletion, the only text I'm interested in is the one just beyond the end of the selected words!...
THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del! Ready for the big day?" "Sure, what do you have in mind?" "A tour... to a place you've often seen but never noticed." "I like it already. Where?" "A page in MS Word." "Eh? Microsoft Word? I must've done two-thirds of all my work there - even starting before Windows. If there's one place that holds no mysteries for me!" "So you might think, my sweet bundle of mashed-up bones, so you might think!" "Okay, I believe you, number one because I have to and number two because I want to. But may I ask why?" "Yes, of course. You feel that you were unjustly removed from the telephones and tablets of the world, correct?" "Well, I can't say 'unjustly' - there wasn't any room for two deletion buttons, so they left the big guy - they left Backspace... but all right, yes, it hurts." "What if I told you I could...
It wasn’t fair! Un-doodoo! The impact on Del's body was catastrophic, like a meteor landing on a bag of potato chips. The only three parts of him miraculously left unscathed were his hands, eyes and iPhone. 
For long months, the beeps on the life support systems attached to his splintered remains would abruptly flat-line and issue jarring acoustic alarms that had medics, nurses, and organ harvesters scrambling to his bedside.But each time, with a rattle and a moan that stubborn clump of cells called Del would pull through. Father Oregano, who ran the hospital's Catholic chapel, was already calling it a miracle.
The only problem was finding the holy person responsible for Del's prodigious survival. What happens when major miracles - obvious miracles - take place, but are left unclaimed and/or unattributed? Father Oregano was granted permission to search through Del's personal effects for clues to the still anonymous benefactor and was pleased no end when he found the name of a certain Jeffery Preston Bezos who had promised to look after Del's future and cover all contingencies. The good priest duly took note and sent the information to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints. 'Servant of God Jeff Bezos' had a nice ring to it! 
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