Spring Ahead

 [Author's Note: they can't all be winners]

Art by Will

Pen springs. Watch springs. Leaf springs. Twisty bits of metal that make the world run. Now I was running, delivering amusing automata to good boys and girls. Those springs, however, had me all twisted up.

You'd think making a spring would be easy. Shape some metal the way you'd like an presto! But no, there's heating and cooling and the selection of alloys and all that sort of stuff. You have to consider how many times the spring will need to expand or contract. You have to consider how far it should move. In short, it's complicated.

Too complicated, it seems, for a specific short person. I'd put an elf named Pep in charge of spring acquisition. It seemed straight forward enough - his predecessor had bounced up the chain of command and Pep was next in line. Instead of keeping existing contracts or moving production to trusted people in-house, however, Pep decided to "take initiative" and move all our spring production to the lowest bidder. I'll admit I'd been eager to cut costs, but I hadn't anticipated quite the disaster that would ensue.

Do you realize how many springs are in the things all around you? Now add in the toy business - wind ups, springs to hold the batteries in, all the little cheap ways to store energy as little ones interact with the toys. It's a shit-load. Now imagine a quarter of them don't work. Your wind up soldiers don't army-crawl. Your pull-string talking bears leave their string dangling like a Kodiak with a tape-worm. In short, disappointment. Christmas down the toilet instead of down the chimney.

So what does one do? One perseveres.

Pep, for their part, put together a team to find the duds and pull them from the production line. They also reached out to old vendors to get replacements and fixes. It was, however, too little and too late for the Christmas Eve deadline.

So now I was stuck delivering toys to girls and boys that may or may not work the way they were intended. I'll have to put the spy division on checking for broken toys in addition to whether or not someone's been naughty or nice. It's a clusterfuck.

I could see the headlines tomorrow - "is Santa a fraud?" "Christmas Catastrophe" "Blunders in Toyland". I'd mad the best decision given the information at hand, but I was sure to be blamed and punished for the result. The island of misfit toys was about to have an immigration crisis.

I delivered the duds nonetheless. We hopped from house to house hoping we'd caught most of the defects but well aware our failure rate was much higher than acceptable. There was nothing else we could do - no gift was worst than a broken gift, right?

At the end of the day we got the job done. The present found their way under trees and in stockings. We'd caught and replaced as many duds as we could. We set up surveillance and a system for replacements. I was still dejected - I wanted to provide mirth and joy, not disappointment.

I crawled into bed after the long day. Mrs. Claus tried to comfort me.

"You'll bounce back," she assured me. The pun stung.