Our Santa

Our Santa’s gone all high tech

He’s gotten very mod,

Us elves are all “network connect”

With I-pad, ‘phone and ‘pod.

Once we were a simple 0p

Our busy workshops hummed

As all us elves without a stop

Made toys of pieces gummed.

We carved and smoothed and fashioned ‘em

And took great pride to see

All decorated, stitched and hemmed,

Those joys for Xmas Tree.

Along came metal press machines

That stamped out toys galore

But still we managed, worked in teams,

Producing more and more.

We screwed and clipped and fitted each

With clockwork motors keyed.

Mass production’s peak we’d reach

To meet the children’s need.

And then were plastic, moulded toys,

Electric battery charged.

Out-sourcing toys became the ploy

To meet demands enlarged.

Our workshops, cleared of tools and gear,

Into ‘Departments’ now divided,

Us elves, re-skilled and relocated here

S-S, D-B, Net-guided.

But elfin minds still struggle with

Words, not Files, corrupted—

Like BIT and BYTE and BUS and TIFF

Or RAID and RE-FORMATTED.

And as for words like DOS and BIOS,

Then PING and POP and SIM,

With GUI, ROM and then with CMOS

Our elfin MEMORY waxes DIM.

Or, in ‘Accounts’ we struggle over

CELLS and ROWS and FORMULAE.

And ADDRESS and RANGES are no clover, And Graph? whether LINE, BAR or PIE?

And in the D-B-M-S Section?

There’s RECORD, FIELD and FORM

VALUE, FORMAT, KEY, RELATION

With REPORT and QUERY nom!

Us older elves do ‘General’ office:

‘Phone and fax and word process

With email, net and such like service

And Santa need to second guess.

Some days the old man looks embarrassed.

Are his changes just mere fad?

By younger elves he’s kindly harassed:

“Just let’s get with it, Dad!”

And as for Merry X, well she

As CEO of ‘Personnel’

Gets things done ASAP

By treating us ‘just swell’.

Some things remain almost the same,

Santa, Merry, all us elves,

The reindeers with their cheeky games—

We’re pretty much ourselves.

Poor Rudolf’s nose used tinted be

With paint phosphorent red,

Now O-H-S insists, you see,

It glow a hi-tech LED.

It acts as his own traffic light

As low-flying through the town

He turns his head from left to right

To slow all traffic down.

But then in cruise-control, up high,

Star-dust rockets super-sonic,

He whizzes past the big jets by,

His sleigh, now extra galactic.