IN THE MIDDLE

A Christmas Story: Santa Sleighs Federal Express

Me? I can't decide between the unavailable Network Computer (NC) and the latest, but expensive Intel dual CPU Pentium Pro box running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. So, I'll ask for a CD-ROM game--and get a tie instead.

This "making a list and checking it twice" has made me wonder a little bit about Santa Claus and his long night of work on Christmas Eve. How does he get it all done? It's a project larger than the Olympics, one that even IBM hasn't attempted to solve.

There's been some discussion of this. I recently reviewed the data from that "Is there a Santa Claus?" article originally published in SPY magazine (January 1990). You know, the one that circulates on e-mail every year arou nd this time. It recounts the many problems that face the white-bearded one with the miraculous sleigh.

First there's the transportation problem: Just which of the 300,000 speci es of living organisms might be the flying reindeer that Santa uses for delivery? No reindeer has been given the flight check mark in the comparison chart. Other animals, yes. Reindeer, no. (Windows95 along with Office97 on a 16-MB PC doesn't fly either, but I digress.)

Then there's the delivery logistics problem: How can one person visit more than 2 billion gift recipients (children under 18), though some believe that number is cut to a paltry 378 million by excluding Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children who don't receive Santa Delivery Service (SDS)? And, this is all delivered from one place--the North Pole. Now that's a centralized storage facility if I ever saw one. Well, actually, I've never seen the North Pole.

Then there's the problem of delivering practically simultaneously to so many recipients. The article details computations proving that Santa's sleigh must travel approximately 650 miles per second. Reindeer have been clocked at only 15 miles per hour, tops. I have a hard time believi ng that the sky road really can support such speeds. Hard to believe, too, that such a network for delivery would be built to be used for only one night a year.

There's the payload problem as well: Those gifts are judged to weigh more than 300,000 tons (not counting Santa). I'm not even going to suggest that the air resistance problem is worth discussion (for example, given friction with such mass at such speed, the sleigh must burst into flames instantaneously).

Santa seems to have quite a few challenges for his one night a year overnight delivery service.

How Santa Does It Given these problems, I think I've got an idea how Santa does it: He has designed his delivery application in such a way that the impossible massive overnight delivery has, in fact, become possible. Much of what he's done smacks of good middleware ap proaches (you had to have known that I'd tie middleware into this somehow), though, granted, not exactly in a computer application setting.

Simultaneous delivery? Well, overnight delivery is the big myth. Delivery actually happens during the few months prior to Christmas. It's only the opening or viewing that's done simultaneously on Christmas morning. SDS recruits a large army of local agents (also known as parents) to help with deliveries. These stooges are so well-indoctrinated that they actually pay for the privilege of delivering presents. Plus, there are the middlemen (FAO Schwarz, etc.) that graciously accept this parental penance, perhaps to pay the elves, though certainly taking quite a percentage along the way. Eventually, of course, that money is supposed to make it back to Santa. I doubt if he sees much of a percentage though; he's not much of an entrepreneur, as evidenced by the fact that he has yet to do an IPO.

The vehicle? I can only assume that reindeer is a euphemism (or as we say in our industry, an alpha product code name) for some incredible technology that hasn't been fully announced to the world yet. For reasons of his own, Santa's keeping his litt le reindeer project a secret from the rest of us. Still, I think I have an idea. He uses a variety of vehicles, from trucks to railroads to airplanes to cars. Since he's predelivering, he can use conventional means of delivery over existing paths. The sleigh-in-the-sky bit is simply good marketing. In fact, every present certainly takes multiple vehicles along the way, last but not least the parental automobile, on its way to the Christmas tree.

Payload? Well, predelivering means that no one trip has to take all the packages for everyone. Good thing, because I don't think the reindeer would be up to it. Nor Santa. Turns out, some proportion of the payload is added later in the delivery cycle: gift wrapping. The unpaid parents do that. Santa also doesn't actually install or set up all those presents anyway. I know: I've stayed up the night b efore assembling a bike. Maybe Santa's a master mechanic, but if he took the time I take to put together certain presents, he wouldn't get past the first house.