It was three in the afternoon on a rainy night in Seattle. Death rode shotgun with Jenny Altcair, a chubby girl on her way to work. As Jenny's vehicle crested the hilltop death leaned over and touched her shoulder. Instantly the car lost traction and skidded out of control. Jenny screamed, while steering into the skid, but it was too late. Her car slid sideways into a telephone pole which smashed through her door and fracturing her skull. In her last seconds she could make out the outline of the shadowy figure sitting next to her.

"Hello Jenny, I'm death, welcome to the other side."

The ringing phone snapped the grim reaper out of his trance. He looks over and sees Bob from HR is calling him, again.

"Shit," he whispers under his breath as he reaches for the phone, "Yello? This is Grim, how can I help you?" he says with a forced smile.

"Mr Reaper, it's Bob, I've been trying to reach you for some time about your personnel file," Bob says through a mouth full of cheetos, "as I said in our last conversation, we need verification of citizenship status, if we don't get..."

"Yes, got it," Death interrupts Bob, bored and frustrated by his existence,"I'll see if I can dig it up," he says before he hangs up the phone. Death still can't get used to this world where no one dies anymore. In the past he would have transported himself up to that HR office and watched gleefully as he gave Bob a well deserved heart attack, but now, the nanobots in Bob's heart would repair him faster than Death could injure him.

This back-and-forth between Death and medicine went on for centuries. Death found he had to work harder and harder as time wore one. In his hay-days he could whisper in a King's ear, an idea, a war, and thousands would die. He could make a potion and feed it to rats, and plagues would spread. But as time went on, it became more difficult to do his jobs. Medicine and technology eclipsed Death's ability to kill. Eventually found even causing near fatal accidents had no effect.

Death became an anachronism. The most powerful and inevitable force ever conceived ceased to matter. That realization haunts Death more than anything ever. His entire existence has no meaning. Death sits at a desk in Atlanta inputting sales data, because he, in the ultimate irony and twists of fate, Death cannot bring death to anyone, including himself. So he sits, and he waits, and Death hates.