Because of my long background in clerking I am sometimes asked to fill in working the registration desk in the afterlife.
My desk isn't the first place people come after they die, that would be kind of intense. They go first, as I understand it, to a neutral, pleasant place in order to adjust to being dead. This can be very quick or very slow depending, as everything does everywhere, on the person. But once they've accepted, in some basic way, that they're dead, they come to me, where I enter them in the system.
Sometimes we sit in chairs and I write their information in a large and beautifully bound ledger. Sometimes the information is absorbed into air screens, which is a technology most of us won't live long enough to see in the world. Sometimes I type it into my computer. But whatever the method, we are always in what looks like a library.
I ask them questions, but not always the same ones, which makes the whole thing way more enjoyable for me. I might ask one person how they liked the cheese on earth, and another for their email address. I can ask how someone did financially or I can ask about their first kiss, if they had one.
Not everyone has.
They have questions too. I can't answer most of them even if I try. A lot people ask me about God. What I usually say to a question like "Is there a God?" is "Yes. I'm sort of him for the time being." Just because a person is dead doesn't make the correct answers to spiritual questions any less ephemeral. Nevertheless there's plenty of good information in my answer, even if hardly anyone makes use of it, another common quality of spiritual wisdom.
I love when people are more generally curious. Like I'm always happy to turn my screen, or open my book to show footage of what dinosaurs really looked like, or a street scene in ancient Egypt. And if it's a slow night I don't mind letting the intake process get derailed like this for hours.
But eventually I always have what I need. I get their pin number, or social security number, or favorite color, and send them on their way to one of two doors.
In the end it's all very traditional.
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