The North Poll

The scene repeated itself all over the snow globe. Someone would come into work after seeing Moneyball, suddenly convinced they knew how to fix their own antiquated industry perilously barreling towards irrelevance. Maybe it was Brad Pitt’s jawline or a dormant love of baseball, but something was happening here. You could taste it. Master plumbers berated union reps for their crude dismissal of data. Joint fitters did the same. But the most glaring example of this was what transpired in the Arctic Circle, where a revolution was under way.

Kringle had always relied on the “eye test” when judging good and bad children (while it's true that this is usually a binary choice between two poles, in rare cases some kids are deemed "weird"). Over the years though, as his touch eroded, he continually missed the mark, gifting Xboxes to teenage sociopaths and filling stockings with Lackawanna Valley anthracite for model students. It wasn’t entirely his fault. His research department, if you could even call it that, had been gutted when elf after elf flew south, with big dreams and empty wallets. Something about Will Ferrell and not feeling appreciated. 

Originally, Kringle did his shopping for Christmas the day before, believing that a sense of pressure gave him the necessary motivation to succeed. He hadn’t anticipated globalization, overpopulation, and a lack of roomy chimneys in new construction projects. Times were changing, but he had not. 

A few winters ago, Kringle furloughed every elf, replacing them with Ivy leaguers – experts on forecasting and number crunching and he’d grown tired of risk and unpredictability. He wanted answers to things before they happened. He wanted to know the makeup of good and bad in specific counties, using that to plot his optimal route. He wanted a diet plan for each reindeer and a beard trimmer unaffected by the cold.

 

The problem is that some kids aren’t naughty until Christmas Eve, when most of the list has already been compiled. Still, they untuck themselves from bed and set fire to a woodshed or rip the head off a sibling’s precious doll. All the data in the world can’t predict that sort of last minute shift. Kringle had his raw instincts - instincts he’d chosen to ignore. A few years back one of the Dartmouth grads tried to convince the Big Man to delay his ride for a week since the weather  looked pretty bad. Explaining to the geek that this wasn’t an option, Kringle knew he’d erred, letting the pendulum swing so far it was liable to break someone's red nose. 

Kringle’s back doing it like the old days, when a broken tail light in his sleigh would get him a pass from generous Canadian Mounties. When missing some kids homes was part of the deal. When coal didn't carry any environmental concern. Some of the Ivy Leaguers are still around, now working with the elves, marrying data with the old school.

Sometimes, you just have to trust your gut and hope for the best. And in Kringle’s case, it’s quite a gut.