My Autobiography
by
Helen A. Handbasket

Chapter One

     It's not like I planned on working for the devil. The devil comes in many disguises and in my case he used one of the best, but we'll get to that. All in all, he was a pretty good boss. No harassment, easy hours, prompt payment, paychecks that always cashed, even medical. I had nothing to complain about.
     I don't know where the investment capital came from and I wish everyone would quit asking. The company was formed long before I every worked there, and don't forget I started out as a secretary. It was at least a year before I became Chief of Operations, but it was still at a salaried position, no stock, no ownership of any kind. I didn't know who owned it or even what that product was. The Dark One was sort of tight lipped about the whole thing. Sure there were rumors, but nobody really know anything. Besides, sometimes people just disappeared. They would just be there one day, filing papers, delivering demons, and be gone the next, even though they were supposed to be regular employees. Rumors were vicious about what would happen to slackers so it's no surprise that most employees toed the line. 
     I'll never forget the day Lucifer gave me a Cray. The day before I had told him he needed a computer. He said what kind, I said the biggest and the fastest, the next day he gives me this Cray with a billion gigas of everything. That was Beelzebub, Mr. Overindulgent, but we'll get to that.
     What's important is you understand that my relationship with him was purely business. I received wages by the hour for services received and that was it. I never made any sort of deal like the rest of his clientele. My soul was left entirely out of our negotiations. He was the CEO, and when I started out I didn't even harbor a dream of becoming executive director. I certainly had no idea I was working for the flaming pit of hellfire, at least not until I gained access to the filing system.
     How did I do it? By creating it. Before me, would you believe it, the Lord High Demon of the Dark had no filing system. It was chaos. It was impossible to dig out old cases that were supposed to be kept active. It was worse than an insurance company. Contracts weren't filed in any order whatsoever, not even by blood type. They were just thrown in a big pile, sort of like the Internet, this vast library full of arcane knowledge but with a copy of Hustler stuck between every book. It made no sense. This was no way to run an office. 
     I immediately hired a couple of assistants who it turned out were executed in the 16th century for plagiarism and once again, I must repeat to you, Who knew? I didn't. They looked like regular guys to me, college students with a summer job, no history at all. I was supposed to know that this was part of their just rewards? 
     There was a crew of five. I'll get to the other three later because it's just too painful. I put them all to work sorting through every single contract my boss had ever signed. Just getting them delivered to the office was a hassle you wouldn't believe. They were being stored in a container that defied description and logic, so the first thing we had to do was transfer all the paperwork from this giant contraption that was much more dangerous than it looked, but we'll get to that. Once we got the material, we were elated to find that his Satanic Majesty, despite all his other shortcomings, had scrupulously dated almost every contract. Our first goal was simply placing them in chronological order.
     It's the earliest ones that weren't dated because they seemed to have been signed before the history of man. We made a special folder for those because we didn't know where else to put them. The file got so extensive that I ordered carbon dating just to give us an idea but it just ended up confused the matter. One seemed to date back to the Jurassic era. It made no sense at all, something about a time traveler named Bradbury and a butterfly. Time had damaged the delicate paper and we couldn't make out the rest so there wasn't much we could do about it but scan it and shred it.
     It wasn't long before we found our first open case. It was a signed and dated contract promising that such and such would happen on such and such a date, and the obligation had clearly never been fulfilled. 
     What can I say, I was young. I thought people were supposed to keep their promises, not like one particular person I've purposely neglected to mention. I know it sounds ridiculous but I was furious. I walked right up to his Satanic Majesty, shoved the paper in his face, and asked how he could he treat his clients so poorly. He just laughed and told me not to worry, that he would never run out of clients. I guess he appreciated my spunk so he authorized me to go ahead on my own initiative and settle some of the cases that he didn't want to be bothered with.
     A lot of them were easy. There were souls that were long overdue to be released from the eternal agony of the ever blazing fire at the fulcrum of the furnace of never-ending damnation. All I had to do was issue a memo and they were set free. 
     Some were pretty complicated. There was the case of the mix-up of bodies, the soul that was supposed to go to heaven but went to a leper colony while the soul meant for the leper colony ended up in California where he met a girl who subsequently didn't fall in love with the man with whom she was destined have a child named Pauly Shore and the whole of history was sent into chaos, reality became television, television reality, and money ran everything. Who was supposed to straighten it out? Not me. Not without going back in time, which is what we eventually did, but I'll get to that.
     At first I didn't have access to time travel. I know it sounds naïve since a lot of the contracts couldn't possibly be fulfilled unless somebody from some other department was taking trips into the past, the future, and sometimes both simultaneously. It's not like I read every contract, and some of them, well, who knew what to believe. You obviously couldn't take them literally. Beelzebub signed some pretty crazy stuff when he was in one of his whimsical moods. How else do you explain the presidential election last year, but we'll get to that.
     What's important aren't those past cases. All of the really old ones are closed, put through the shredder, though shredder's a poor word for Mephistopheles peculiar methods for disposing of documents. He sets them on fire then snorts the ashes up his nose. Disgusting.
     The point is that even though I no longer work there, Old Scratch still uses the filing system I set up for him which I've had access to ever since he went online. Believe it or not, Satan just went online this year because in about 600 BC he had signed a document related to a Universal Answer Retrieval System, which his lawyers interpreted as referring to the World Wide Web. In this document, Lucifer was specifically forbidden to access this new database until the start of the new millennium, which is only 25 days old today. If you surf the net, you've probably already seen his site but you don't know it. Mysterious ways and all.
     So imagine if you will that you are me. Wouldn't you be curious what was going on back at the old company? Are you surprised that I am still able to access the demonic operating system whenever I please? If you had cloven hoofs and horns growing out of your forehead, if you were the king of your dominion, lord of your realm, with thousands of souls at your beck and call, how often do you think you would change your access codes?  Believe me it won't even occur to him.
     Will he find me? Not here he won't. Does he know I'm revealing his secrets? Sorry, but I saw the way he works. He's not paying any attention at all. He's too busy. Anyway, that's why I'm out here in the desert. I'll never run into him here. The devil hates the desert because it reminds him of home.

MY MOM