Letter Found on a Floating Door

Salvaged from the Beaufort Sea near Barrow, Alaska

Jeremy Puma
Invironment
Published in
3 min readDec 16, 2016

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To: All Employees of North Pole Amalgamated Inc.
From: S. Claus, President and CEO
Date: December 16, 2019

Dearest Elves —

Yesterday’s warehouse flood marks the fifth time this winter we’ve needed to stop all operations in order to literally bail ourselves out. Your hard work during the clean-up is appreciated. We would like to especially recognize Tinky, Blinky, and Peppermint for their willingness to put in some extra overtime hours.

Meanwhile, we’ve set up a GoFundMe for Tinsel’s family, who find themselves in a difficult situation after his legs were injured by hungry polar bears during his heroic defense of the Candy Cane Shack . Please consider donating a few dollars if you’re able, at http://www.gofundme.com/tinselskids.

As you know, the past year has been one disaster after another. Replacing the reindeer we’ve lost to anthrax and other thawed microbes is no longer cost-effective. It’s becoming more and more difficult to keep our location secret from all of the cruise ships and oil rigs. We’ve had to increase our food imports significantly since our hunters and fishermen haven’t had a successful expedition in months.

Now we have water in the compound almost every day. We’ve already had to abandon Sugarplum Village. Gumdrop Lane has become more like Gumdrop Canal. There are narwhals in the basement of the Center for Strategic Gift-wrapping.

This is a crisis like we’ve never seen. This is worse than the Reindeer Game riots of ’34. It’s worse than the Elf Strike of ’77. It’s even worse than the Great Foggy Blizzard of ’54 (with apologies to the Rudolph family, who recently lost their paterfamilias to anthrax).

The Board discussed a number of options. We considered relocating inland, but the permafrost is so unstable we were unable to find a suitable place to rebuild nearby. We thought about retrofitting our current facilities, but to do so we’d need an estimated $2 billion investment, and we just don’t have that kind of capital.

So, although announcements of this kind this close to the holidays are always difficult, it is with great sadness that I am forced to inform you that operations at North Pole HQ will be suspended indefinitely.

We are in discussions with Exxon Mobil, who have expressed an interest in acquiring our land and sea holdings for petroleum exploration. We are also entertaining a bid from Energy Transfer Partners, who will be extending a pipeline to the recently discovered oil shale fields on Prince of Wales Island.

North Pole Amalgamated Inc. will be reloacting our headquarters to Seattle, Washington, to take advantage of the local Innovation Ecosystem (and the sunny weather!).

Those of you who will be remaining with the core business team after our relocation have already received your offer letters. Other departments will be dissolved according to the following plan:

  • Customer Service will now be based in Troll Mountain. CS Leads should coordinate with our new VP of Customer Excitement, Grargh Hairyarms, who will introduce you to your new Troll “Superlearners” for training. If you choose to relocate to Troll Mountain, we can provide a small stipend for cave rental.
  • We are proud to have a new contract with Boston Dynamics, who will be addressing our reindeer issues:
  • Finally, we will be moving our manufacturing and distribution operations to two new locations, one in Shenzhen, PRC, and the other — fully automated — in Sparks, Nevada as part of the Tesla Gigafactory Concern.

The rest of you are invited to stay onboard through our new partnership with Uber’s UberRUSH program. You can sign up as a driver for Uber http://www.uber.com, and continue to make deliveries from anywhere in the world.

On a personal note, both Mrs. Claus and I sincerely appreciate the hard work and dedication you’ve shown over the millennia. To this end, we’ve left a little something extra in each of your stockings this year: a $150 gift certificate for Amazon.com.

If any of you ever find yourself in need of a reference, please don’t hesitate to ask.

At this point the letter becomes illegible due to water damage.

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Jeremy Puma
Invironment

Plants, Permaculture, Foraging, Food, and Paranormality. Resident Animist at Liminal.Earth