The following is an excerpt from the prologue:

I had been working in Information Technologies for twenty years with most of that time spent in system analysis. It’s the analyst’s task to evaluate what’s going on in a business and suggest ways in which the end result can be achieved most efficiently. Much of the job entails following the paper trail as it passes from one department to another to understand what each does (or at least what they think they do). Only when you fully understand what’s going on can you identify the common processes that integrate all aspects of the business. At that point you’re in a position to offer suggestions on how things might be improved, which is when the problems really start.

Almost every senior manager I’ve ever met has considered theirs to be the most important and least appreciated department in the company. Initial interviews with department heads tend to focus more on their complaints than the business at hand - we might get paid a lot but nowhere near as much as a psychiatrist!  It all changes when they receive your functional specification of course. Though inter-departmental rivalries are of little interest to the seasoned systems analyst you still have to convince everyone that your suggestions won’t change anything – well, not too much anyway. So, you exercise tact and diplomacy, go above their heads and let the person paying your fees make the final decision. Secretly everyone's prepared for the inevitable and hope they aren't first for the chop.

Having looked to every major Religion in my search for closure, contrary to what their department heads would have me believe I found little to choose between them and even less by way of a reason for my loss.  And though medical science provides a perfectly good explanation of how someone dies believe me when I say there's little comfort knowing that nothing much else could have been done to prevent it.  Closure as far as the doctors are concerned perhaps, but definitely not the bereaved.

What is beyond belief is that followers of any religion could presume the creator capable of condemning more than half his creations at birth because the sign above the exit reads, “Members Only”. Pinned to the door is a handwritten note, “Please observe the strict dress code and refrain from eating, drinking, thinking or self-abuse whilst in the waiting room” with another stating, “Definitely NO animals past this point!” under which some joker has scrawled “Except those created in HIS image”.  As for the growing ranks of the faithless who market scientific discovery like the latest computer system as a solution to all your office problems, you know damn well it’s going to be obsolete within a matter of months because you’ve already had to upgrade three times in the past five years!

So this book is my functional specification for Life, Inc. – an attempt to make sense of a business that employs billions of people, has seen numerous management takeovers in the past several thousand years and appears to be in constant danger of collapse. No one really seems to know who, why, or how it was started, what it produces or its purpose.