The Admin's Tale - Work from here (home) edition
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone...
Santa's singing this song all day long. He's at home - well that's not so unusual this time of the year, but it feels unusual. Santa and all of his staff have to stay at home as almost everyone else has to. And so do I.
I'm one of his elves - but you don't know my name. It's not one of these tiny sickly-sweet ones, Snowball or Tinsel or something like this. You can call me Admin. I know, it's not very Christmas-ish, but I'm not either.
Most of the year, I'm working in a fairytale land far far away from the North Pole. It's so much more pleasant there, warm and sunny. My job is bringing modern technology to the, well I would call them old-fashioned fairy tale characters. It's a hard life. But now, it's even harder. The King (remark: Kings usually do not have names in fairytales) the Snow Queen and the the Frog Prince (all of them currently in power here in the land of fairytales) deliberated and passed a law which states that every single foreign resident has to leave the land because of a plague Maleficent sent to the country. At least that's what they believe. I told you, they are quite old-fashioned.
And so here I am, again in the cold, with all the other elves with their sweet names, all the reindeers with or without red noses (Rudolph is not the only one with that kind of nose). It's annoying...
Of course, the north is suffering from the plague as well. It's not just a fairyland issue and we all have to stay in our hut together with Santa singing
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone...
the whole day long.
I had to leave the fairyland a few weeks ago. But of course, they couldn't do without me. Well, fairytale characters and technology, could there be something more contradictory? They needed help with their magic spells written down in Confluence (you know, the new editor), the Queen of Hearts wasn't able to find any "Off with their heads"-issue in her royal Servicedesk and a lot other problems emerged.
They sent a messenger on a horseback to the North Pole and asked for help. And so I'm working from here (No, not home, I refuse to call this hut my 'home').
It was a tough challenge. First I had to convince Santa that we need a high speed internet access. He's old-fashioned too ('We don't need this modern useless stuff here') and thrifty. You can't imagine how expensive internet access is in our part of the world. But after I promised to use the additional income for building even more children's toys and not for my personal wellbeing, he agreed. Goodbye chocolate, goodbye boardgames.
Instead, we laid cables, I got a brand new notebook and so the journey began.
Day 1
I never knew, how loud all the other elves could be. And if that's not enough, Santa, humming or singing the whole day long (You know, 'What the world needs now...'). And all this in a small hut at the end of the world.
And it's cold - I begin to hate Working from Here before it has even started.
Every few minutes another elf comes by, looks at my screen and asks what I'm doing. And there are a lot of them. I'm glad the reindeers are not allowed to enter the hut. Really, I love my sisters and brothers, but it's hard to concentrate this way. I can understand them, they have to stay at home without anything to do. It's too early for taking care of the children's wish lists and Santa doesn't allow them to play with the remaining toys from last Christmas ('We can use them next Christmas and children do not like used toys').
But I'm also impressed. The engineers did an awesome job, the performance is great. Technologically, it feels like I am in the fairyland in person.
I was able to help Snowwhite writing a Confluence page ('Recipes using poisoned apples') and also Little Red Riding Hood ('How I met my Grandmother') today. A problem is that my zoom account is not confirmed yet. Seems they have a lot to do at the moment. The Queen of Hearts has to wait until tomorrow. Let's not exaggerate on the first day.
Tip of the day: Search the pile of wrapped Christmas gifts for Headphones, most suitable are noise cancelling ones. And don't tell Santa...
P.S.: If you're interested in the song, Santa is singing all day long:
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Thomas Schlegel
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Administrator
HanseMerkur
Hamburg, Germany
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