WEST CHESTER, Penna. – Because of the overwhelming number of prayers received in the weeks before the deaths of Terri Schaivo and Pope John Paul II, God has installed caller ID and an automated phone menu to handle all future prayer requests.
These features are part of the new fiber-based Verizon Corporate Package, which also includes call forwarding, call blocking, and hands free dialing. The latter functionality, said a Verizon executive, is appealing to God for obvious reasons.
A high-ranking member of the heavenly host, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that God was “madder than heck” about the increased number of prayers he has been receiving from “God botherers” of late, especially prayers for the dying.
“No offense meant,” said the official, “but everybody’s got to die sometime. That’s the way life works. People who asked God to spare John Paul or Terri were wasting their breath. What was He going to spare them for? To testify at the Michael Jackson trial? To host ‘Saturday Night Live’? People ought to stop and think before they pray.”
As a consequence of the high number of prayers God receives, He will no longer answer them directly, an activity He engaged in “much less frequently than people reported anyway,” the official said.
All prayers will now be “answered” by an automated voice machine that will announce, “Thank you for calling the Heavenly Hotline. Because your call is important to us, we have installed the following menu to help facilitate your request. For your protection your call may be monitored. Please listen carefully before making your selection.
“To listen to the menu in Spanish, press 1. In case of genuine emergencies such as fires, catastrophic illnesses, and ‘acts of God,’ press 2. For divine assistance in locating lost car keys, press 3. For intervention with Microsoft products, including the new MSN Web browser, press 4. To request supernatural help for a sports team, press 5. If you have already prayed concerning your issue today, please hang up and call again tomorrow.”
When asked why God wanted caller ID in addition to the automated answering system, the official replied that God was concerned about stalkers who pray excessively.
“He’s gosh darn close, pardon my French, to instituting the kind of policy enforced by many sports talk radio stations, which limit individuals to one call per week and one on weekends,” the official said. “For the time being, however, we’re still allowing people one prayer per incident per day.”
Several other insiders, who also would not speak for attribution, blamed Americans for God’s tough love policy. Their claim is supported by a Washington Post study, which revealed that 36 percent of Americans pray several times a day, 22 percent pray once a day, and 16 percent pray several times a week. What’s more, no American politician speaking to a group larger than one would think of closing his or her remarks without saying, “God bless America.”
Europeans, on the other hand, pray far less frequently and attend religious services, a known source of prayer, far less often than Americans do. Half of all Americans attend church every week while less than 10 percent of the populations of the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark attend religious services even once a month.
Verizon officials were understandably delighted with their newest corporate client. One Verizon executive said that “much praise” is due to Allah, who installed the corporate package several months ago and is “thrilled” with the results. The two leaders discussed the idea, said the Verzon official, at the annual Supreme Beings conference held last week above Las Vegas.
In other news, Paula Abdul revealed that she has been suffering from a rare, chronically painful syndrome that can be alleviated only by random sex and hyperactive behavior.
