Departmental birthdays.

Today we celebrated department birthdays. There was a time when I actually enjoyed them, particularly those times when you’re flat broke and you know you can look forward to your fellow employees bringing in lots of food for the occasion. As time went on, and you celebrate more birthdays, you find yourself taking count of who continues to show up to these. Your fellow employees who once started out with you are either no longer with the department or have moved on to bigger and better things. You find yourself celebrating birthdays with people over 50 who have been with the company since its heyday.

Now there’s nothing wrong with sharing your birthday with people older than you but you can’t help but contemplate your own mortality at that point.

So this year, monthly birthdays rolled around and as usual, my boss’ assistant gathered people around the usual spot. I heard them singing in the back of the office, “Happy Birthday…” which I was hoping to avoid by raising the volume on my Itunes on my Mac. Eventually someone dragged me over and of course I had to play dumb saying “Oh yeah…we’re doing January birthdays today. Sorry about that guys!” What made it particularly eerie was the toy hamster they had that shakes its hips and sings happy birthday to you. People actually waited for this thing to finish singing!

The boss’ assistant told me she sent an e-mail asking people in the department whether or not they wanted to continue celebrating these on a monthly basis since there is that feeling that people tend to care less about the fact that they're getting older. I told her I thought it was a rhetorical question.

After blowing out the candles and taking in some grub, I got the expected questions about how old I would be next week. I told them I wasn’t sure at the moment and that they should refer to my blog. Everything would be answered there and they could read about my meltdown in progress. Of course, I told them this half-jokingly and got some good laughs out of it.

Walking back to my desk, the guy next to me told me he was turning forty two next month. I felt kinda guilty afterwards; here I was talking trashing about going on forty in a few years and this guys is standing next to me not saying a word. He did say though that its not that bad. Who knows, maybe he’s right. I remember freaking out when I was close to turning thirty. Actually my thirties were way better than my twenties so lets see how this pans out in a few years. Gonna go and grab a stale cookie or whatever is left back there.