In Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft and the Xbox Live team, workers are scurrying around the clock in preparation for the holidays. While their co-workers are finishing up their last bits of work and setting their out-of-office auto-replies to cute “seeing Avatar for the fourth time” messages, these net monkeys are getting ready for the most important weekend of the year – the weekend their online service fails completely.

“Sure, it’s happened every Christmas so far,” said Mark Griffin, reliability officer at Xbox Live, “But this year, we’ve attached the ethernet cables with extra duct tape. In fact, I’ve used over seven rolls of duct tape on this Xbox alone. Wait, what do these blinking red lights mean? Is that bad?”

As many Xbox users have noticed, the massive holiday influx of new users means one thing for the popular online service – a series of failures that lasts days, if not weeks. The tradition ranks up there with Sony PR leaks as a piece of modern gaming history – a piece of history we can all live within, if we can connect to the internet long enough to matchmake a game of Left 4 Dead 2 and briefly discuss it.

This year, workers are toiling around the clock to make sure that plans are in place for the outage. One worker has already supplied the MajorNelson twitter feed with over 30 unique phrases to auto-respond to dejected users, from “we’re working on it” to “please call technical support.” These life-like responses are designed to mirror the efforts of an organization that cares about and monitors its userbase.

Another worker told Hardcasual, “Listen – once the holidays roll around, most of our tech support staff is switched over to PR duties. Basically, it’s more important to reinforce in the press that we’re outselling Sony in the console race. How are we supposed to plan for the possibility that some of the people who bought those systems might try to use them online in the days after Christmas? I mean, how could we ever assume people might start using a video game system THEN, of all times?”

No matter what, though, gamers are sure to enjoy the new features of Xbox Live. “Well, even if you can’t get online, at least you can still use Facebook, Last.FM, Zune streaming, and all the other awesome things we’ve been working on for Xbox Live users all year. Oh, wait. You can’t? Well, shit. Too bad about the weak single-player in Modern Warfare 2, huh?”