Santa's a click away this Christmas

Today, as you spread out the Mirror Magazine with your morning tea in hand and lean back on the sofa, Santa and his little elves are busying themselves with all their last minutes preps and check-ups. Thanks to the latest technology at their disposal, the tasks that used to take months to get completed are now carried out with a click of a mouse and a press of a button on Christmas Eve.

Tink, the accountant elf has never got a holiday – not just because that's how accountants are – but because his job description made it impossible for him to leave his desk. It is his job to keep account of all the good things and bad things that little boys and girls get up to during the year. He then has to sum them up with enough time for Hermy the store-keeper elf to assign the corresponding toys. But things have changed now and Tink's workload has been taken over by servers that are connected to a grid of video cameras installed in the bedrooms and school bags of little children. Software systems running on the servers have motion detectors and voice recognition systems which automatically transfer their logs to the accounting system. Hermy says that his new stock-control system is also capable of forecasting next year's requirements, giving the elves plenty of time to prepare the toys and dramatically reducing wastage and extra labour costs.

'Wink' the navigator has been mapping out the route they would take this year on Google Earth. Of course some of the little boys and girls of last year have grown up to be men and women who won't be getting presents this time around. Then he put markers on those houses where the chimneys aren't safe to climb down through and typed in the alternate access points.

Comet – the lead reindeer interfaces that with his GPS which will then trace the quickest route for him and it will even calculate the approximate duration of the trip (it is hard to say how many slips and falls Santa will have to endure this year, so it is impossible to make exact calculations).

Commenting on how technology has improved the efficiency and productivity of his team, Santa emphasized that the system was designed to comply with the laws of each individual country. Some countries already had the surveillance infrastructure in place to monitor the activities of their population while a few others have agreed to the implementation of the system on grounds that their intelligence services should have full access to its databases. One of our own intelligence officers speaking on grounds of anonymity said, "We see you when you're sleeping; we know when you're awake. We know when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!"