Thursday, May 12, 2005
Who Wants Cake?
Different offices handle people’s birthdays in different ways. The first law firm I worked for, for instance, ignored my birthday entirely. This was not necessarily a bad thing. The specter of Gladys from bookkeeping clapping her hands and singing "Happy Birthday" would have been enough to make me age ten years instead of just the one. Another firm I worked for used birthdays to enforce the rigid caste system, forcing people’s secretaries to plan elaborate fetes for them, distributing Peanuts greeting cards and spending hours at a time baking absurdly complicated dishes endorsed by a pre-prison Martha Stewart. Nothing says, "Hey, buddy, you’re over the hill!" like a little good old fashioned slavery.
My current office, though, finding individual birthdays a little bit too frequent and, well, individual for its taste, has devised a plan whereby we celebrate everyone’s birthdays at once every three months or so. We all gather around the conference table, which has been decked out in paper plates and plastic spoons for the occasion, and eat one of approximately three varieties of cake, each with the same sickeningly sweet frosting. Once, when we were feeling really crazy (it might have been last summer’s birthdays), we had an ice cream cake. Then we sit around for thirty to forty-five minutes and either A) try to remember things about each other’s personal lives (as in "Hey, Janice, how’s that pottery class going?" or "So, Phil, did Martha’s scabies ever clear up?") or B) just give up and talk about work. There’s no singing, the word "birthday" is pretty much not even mentioned, and the party is held without regard to the ability of the purported honorees to attend. Who says that bureaucracy doesn’t work?
So hey, if your birthday is in March, April, or May, it’s your special day, and you didn’t even know it. Sorry we ate all your cake.
Different offices handle people’s birthdays in different ways. The first law firm I worked for, for instance, ignored my birthday entirely. This was not necessarily a bad thing. The specter of Gladys from bookkeeping clapping her hands and singing "Happy Birthday" would have been enough to make me age ten years instead of just the one. Another firm I worked for used birthdays to enforce the rigid caste system, forcing people’s secretaries to plan elaborate fetes for them, distributing Peanuts greeting cards and spending hours at a time baking absurdly complicated dishes endorsed by a pre-prison Martha Stewart. Nothing says, "Hey, buddy, you’re over the hill!" like a little good old fashioned slavery.
My current office, though, finding individual birthdays a little bit too frequent and, well, individual for its taste, has devised a plan whereby we celebrate everyone’s birthdays at once every three months or so. We all gather around the conference table, which has been decked out in paper plates and plastic spoons for the occasion, and eat one of approximately three varieties of cake, each with the same sickeningly sweet frosting. Once, when we were feeling really crazy (it might have been last summer’s birthdays), we had an ice cream cake. Then we sit around for thirty to forty-five minutes and either A) try to remember things about each other’s personal lives (as in "Hey, Janice, how’s that pottery class going?" or "So, Phil, did Martha’s scabies ever clear up?") or B) just give up and talk about work. There’s no singing, the word "birthday" is pretty much not even mentioned, and the party is held without regard to the ability of the purported honorees to attend. Who says that bureaucracy doesn’t work?
So hey, if your birthday is in March, April, or May, it’s your special day, and you didn’t even know it. Sorry we ate all your cake.
