December 11

Jigger's Journal, Part 10

Santa looked so sad. I wanted to stand up and give him a big hug. But if you're an elf you can't really hug Santa. It's not that its against the rules. Santa loves hugs. It's just that we are far smaller than him. If we try to hug him we just end up hugging his knee and tripping him up. Sometimes we do high-fives, but I didn't think a high-five was the right response to the news that the list was missing.

“Are you sure it's stolen?” I asked.

“Yes. No doubt at all. I went to check on it four days ago. You know how we keep it in a memory stick disguised as one of Rudolph's bells? Well, I tried to hook it up to my computer.”

Kate's eyes were as wide as saucers.

“Yes, Kate. I have a computer,” he smiled. “There's a lot of children in the world and I don't want to make a mistake and miss one of them. So we gave a nice young boy an electronics kit sixty years ago and he grew up and invented the computer. And he gave the first one to me.”

Santa went back to his story.

“I went out to the forest looking for Rudolph. He was rooting around in the snow for berries, and he came when I whistled. I took the bell off his collar and went back to my study and fitted it to the computer. At first I thought that there was something wrong with the computer. The bell fitted in perfectly, then the list came up. But straight away I knew something was wrong. The list normally flickers, because thousands of notes are being added to it every minute from my elves all around the world. And this time there was no flicker. The list wasn't moving, wasn't being updated and changed all the time. So I called in one of the computer elves.

“He thought that the computer was frozen, so he put it on the fire for a few minutes. But that didn't help. It still didn't work, and the bottom was beginning to melt. So he took the computer and the memory stick away. He couldn't do a thing with it. None of my computer experts could.”

Kate looked shocked.

“So what did you do?” she asked in a hushed tone.

“I had to do something I haven't done in more than two hundred years. I had to call in a human to help.”

Santa turned to me.

“Do you remember young Billy?”

“I thought back over the years. There were nine hundred and seven thousand four hundred and sixty eight Billys, so it took me a moment.

“Ah yes”, I said. “The American. Billy Doors.”

“Gates,” Santa corrected me. “Billy Gates. But he calls himself Bill now. I called Bill.”

“On the phone?” said Kate.

“No. I sent the sledge. He was at some meeting in Boston and we landed on the roof. When he came out for a break we threw him in a sack and whisked him up here. I don't think he was too happy about that. I had said to the elves to be discrete, and I thought they would explain things properly to him, but they thought it was too secret for that so they used the sack instead. But he was alright when I explained what the problem was. He got straight down to business.

“First he explained to the elves that you don't fix frozen computers by putting them on the fire. Apparently you switch them off and then switch them on again. We were delighted with that tip. It will save us a fortune. We had to replace too many burnt computers last year.

“Then he explained something called hacking. He said someone can put a virus on a memory stick, and it when it gets into the computer it breaks the software inside. I don't know what software is, but if it's broken the computer doesn't run right. That's what happened to us.”

“Your computer is sick?” asked Kate.

“That's a stupid question,” said Leroy.

I was glad Kate had asked it, because it was the same thing I was thinking.

“A computer virus is not like a person virus. It doesn't make the computer sick. It just makes it run wrong,” said Santa. “Bill told us that someone had switched the right memory stick for a fake one, and the fake one had the virus that got into our computer. Now our computer won't update the naughty and nice list, and I have no idea of who has been good this year.”

“That's bad,” I said.

“It get's worse,” said Santa. “All the names are turning naughty one by one. By Christmas Day all the names on the list will be naughty, which means no toys this year. Unless we can fix the problem, Christmas is cancelled.”