Anyway, about the elves. I know you run a loose shop, and the Virtual Elves particularly have a lot of free rein (get it?, rein, reindeer? ha ha! - we'll talk about them later), but you gotta get 'em in a room and set some standards. Tell 'em to remember MIDI. When they all agreed to get together on that rocket ship, man, it just took off. Fabulous Christmases, remember? Hey, even the elves had fabulous Christmases! Anyway, the idea is that they gotta agree on some things, particularly in digital land. Everybody's gotta agree on what they mean by AES/EBU and SPDIF, for instance (no more "Well, our AES/EBU doesn't talk to their AES/EBU"), so that digital data transmission will have the simplicity and robustness of analog patch cords. Please! No more Format Fights! Like I said, remember what happened when they sat down and did MIDI!

Next, they gotta stop building stuff with the mechanical integrity of Tinker Toys® (I know, I know, Tinker Toys® are still great for all the kids who haven't mastered concrete operations yet - but we have needs that are a little more adult here). The physical materials aren't bad, but stuff like screws falling off SCSI connectors because they didn't use lockwashers doesn't cut it. Simple stuff like that. Have 'em take a seminar with the troops at Hummer who do your sleigh maintenance - that'll straighten 'em out in a hurry!

Third, they gotta get into crash-proof operating systems with decent self-diagnostics. These should be operating systems with some real staying power, the ability to diagnose and correct logical faults, log 'em and keep up and running even when all the applications decide to drop acid at the same moment, with the system saving everything to documented temp files and transparently restarting the loony applications and the files so we don't have to keep saying "Oops, don't worry, this happens all the time, no biggie, I don't think we lost anything" to our clients, or even worse (shudder, shudder) to our audiences. We really gotta get away from all this Ctrl-Alt-Del and Restart stuff!

Fourth, tell 'em to get on the stick with on-line diagnostics via modem. No more dorky customer support where you have to write down all this stuff very carefully and have it laid out on your desk exactly in accordance with the manual, including version numbers of all eighteen plug-ins, a list of each piece of hardware, with serial numbers, plus your warranty registration number, a notarized copy of your shrink-wrap license and your birth certificate or passport, only to get a voice-mail message saying everybody's busy and your wait time on the telephone will be 372 minutes, and when the person ("Hi, this is Mork from customer support. How can I help you?") finally comes on the line (by which time your client has gone totally ballistic and is gone, gone forever), Mork goes through this thing about do you have the right computer, and did you read the manual, and how probably you need to unload all eighteen plug-ins using the key discs, reload the system, rebuild the desktop, defrag all the drives, use new SCSI cables, set all the terminators to different positions, re-install each plug-in one at a time using its key disc and try it and then in all combinations (lessee, eighteen factorial is, well, a big number), and then get back to him. Mork has the exact same setup running at his desk and it works fine. Must be something you did. Have a nice day. Click. Click? Aaaaaarghhhh! Where's the letter-bomb kit? Seriously, Santa, tell 'em to build in modems on every little digital device so that their diagnostic bench can get directly on-line with the system in distress and do full operations study, documentation and diagnostics. This is one place where us inarticulate humans and Mork might best stay out of it, and let the virtual rascals sort it out.