Monday

The phone rang about 10 minutes before the alarm clock was set to sound. It wasn't my mobile phone so I knew it must be family. It was my mother-in-law. Apparently she IS reading my blog daily (see yesterday's post for reference). By the time she hung up, the alarm clock was sounding. And I still don't know what to get Mrs. Claus for Christmas this year.

I rushed through my morning routine, even cutting my run short by a mile, so I could make it to the naughty & nice list review. The meeting started off very positive as Elmer informed us that the nice list was up 22% over the previous week. It was a new record for the final week before Christmas. There are more "nice" kids than ever before in history! The signficance of that fact was barely sinking in when Elmer delivered the caveat. In reconciling individual letters with the naughty and nice list, it was discovered that almost52,000 people were somehow left out of the naughty & nice list. The process was automated a few years back but once the discrepancy was found, a team of elves went through each and every letter and reconciled it with the naughty & nice list by hand. Elmer even had a manual re-count conducted after there were winds of some of the "naughty" kids threatening legal recourse with the a claim of significant deficiencies in the count and classification process. The good news on this front was that every single child has now been accounted for. The "naughty & nice" report has also been modified to correct the bug that led to the accidental omissions. The challenge for the day though was whether or not we had sufficient safety stock in the inventory to cover these new requests and/or could we modify our production & procurement plans.

We didn't have time to debate it as I was already running late for my day of public appearances. Today I was making a fairly rare public appearance in China. I certainly didn't want to be late. So we decided we'd address the potential inventory shortage resulting from this finding over conference call. I took the conference call in the sleigh while in route to China. Ollie had just acquired updated reports and it appears that we will cover the potential shortage.

5 continents, 42 cities, & 82,000 kids later, I returned to the North Pole just in time for an update on the weather and flight plans. I am happy to report that all is on track with only minor weather-related adjustments to the preferred routing.

I still have a few hours of work remaining as I submit my post tonight, including conference calls with some small countries that still have not granted airspace. It won't be a problem on Christmas Eve... it never is... but it will require some direct attention from me to make it happen on time.

That's it for now. Merry Christmas, all!