For a few weeks now, I’ve been hearing faint sounds of Christmas music coming through the ceiling in the IT room here at Small Dog HQ. I mumbled some humbuggeries as I headed up the stairs to see what all this was about. As it turns out our new marketeer, Rachel, is a pretty big fan of Christmas and has been playing Christmas music since at least the beginning of December. Through a furrowed brow I made some comments about “kids these days” before returning to my ground level lair to scheme against Christmas and joy in general.
Back at my desk, I opened Safari to begin composing a sternly worded email to management outlining why I felt happiness and joy among employees in the workplace was inappropriate. When Safari opened though, it immediately jumped to santatracker.google.com instead of my usual homepage of http://www.starshiptroopers.net. As I tried to figure out what sorcery had taken place for santatracker.google.com to usurp the coveted designation as my homepage I started to hear cute little noises coming from the page.
Ok, maybe I could take a few minutes and look around before getting on to my email. The animations and sounds were pretty cute after all. As I moved the mouse around, I noticed some of the things on the page were interactive. One of the icons looked like a fan. Clicking on it brought up a little animation of what looked like a blowdryer blowing air at a reindeer on a platform in some kind of elf test lab. Below were controls to click on that changed the speed of the air. A tiny smirk crept onto my face; this was pretty neat. That email still needed to be sent though.
Clicking back I was once again greeted with the cute animations and sounds of this little elf world. There appeared to be many other games, animations and links. There was even a countdown showing when Santa would be making his delivery run. I could only imagine what cute animations that would have!
Before I knew it I had all but forgotten about sending the anti-joy email to management. The Santa Tracker was just too much fun. It was around this time that I felt a sharp pain in my face. Reaching my hand up and expecting to find a gash or inexplicable bruise I found my mouth was contorted into a weird shape that was unfamiliar to me. Opening a new tab in Safari, I entered a description of my symptom into google. The first result was a wikipedia page about smiling. It said that “Among humans, smiling is an expression denoting pleasure, sociability, happiness, or amusement.” My last visit to the physician had indeed confirmed I was human. Was I experiencing this expression of “happiness” and “amusement”?
Eventually, I had to conclude that I was. Maybe Rachel wasn’t so bad after all, and maybe, just maybe, happiness and joy among employees in the workplace was acceptable. Maybe it could even be encouraged. All this change of heart wouldn’t have come about without the simple, cute and fun Santa Tracker at santatracker.google.com.