Instead of being untold riches distributed in unmarked ten pound notes it instead will contain an inevitably unhilarious birthday card. If this process was started by a proto-fascist the card will be accompanied by a worryingly neat pro-forma where individuals can mark when they've signed the card.
The whole process baffles me somewhat, and I presume it's only a theme in offices with women in them (admittedly almost all offices these days). I certainly don't recall the same thing happening when I worked in the male-dominated tech support desk, for instance. Instead, when someone was unlucky enough to be celebrating their birthday they would generally be called 'an old tosser'. If they were a popular member of the team they might be subjected to a physical beating, a method of showing appreceation, presumably. Sometimes a pint was promised later on. In any case, there were no cards.
This is because these things are almost always organised by some friendly if overly-efficient woman who is invariably middle aged. Of course when it comes to her birthday the whole system breaks down into a bloody shambles and everyone forgets until the last minute (cue guilty line manager running up to Clinton Cards at lunchtime).
Anyway, depending on the size of your department and the distribution of birthdays you can expect to get this at varying frequencies. My current department has about fifteen or so people in it, so I get one roughly once a month.
My bafflement mainly stems from the point of the whole exercise. Sure, I can appreciate that getting a birthday card can be nice (it shows someone cares or something) but to get such a formal token seems rather...empty. Pointless, in fact. Furthermore, when one is asked to sign such a thing, what is one supposed to actually write?
If you're lucky, you'll be first or second to receive the card. Then you can just write 'Happy Birthday, have a great day' or something along those lines. The problem is, if you're last to get the card then you'll realise the last fourteen people have written exactly the same bland statement.
In the Buffy episode 'Out of Mind, Out of Sight' the Scooby's find a (presumably disappeared) young girl's year book which has been signed entirely with the platitude 'Have a nice summer'.
Willow: 'Oh, my God. 'Have a nice summer.' 'Have a nice summer.' This girl had no friends at all.If such a thing exists for birthday cards it must certainly be 'Happy Birthday, have a great day!' (exclamation mark optional, depending on one's outlook). The point is that it shows that
Giles: 'Uh, once again, I teeter at the precipice of the generation gap.
Buffy: ''Have a nice summer' is what you write when you have nothing to say.'
Xander: 'It's the kiss of death.'
a) You've got nothing personal to say to this individual
b) You took zero effort/time to actually think of something.
Needless to say I am no exception, although ocassionally I try to write something with a different turn of phrase. For instance, it was the birthday of the youngest member of our department, who turned 21 on Friday. So I wrote
'Happy Birthday, enjoy the decline. :('
The remark was not supposed to be particularly caustic but merely a reflection on some obvious truths. Things, in a physical sense, tend to go downhill from 21 or so. And you may as well be aware of it early on. Sure, you can arrest such a decline by a good diet, working out, etc - but generally you're only slowing the inevitable.
Of course, that much is obvious and I imagine everyone expects certain 'changes'. For instance, people tend to get fatter. They tend to get balder (or greyer). More wrinkles. They tend to get more tired easily. Their memory goes. And so on. I anticipated all of this and much more. What I didn't anticipate was other, slightly more pathetic changes.
For instance, my nose has become a lot more hairy. My sense of smell has declined dramatically (I'm not sure if this is related to the former point). I find myself needing more sleep in order to stay even remotely sharp. My jaw randomly cracks if I open it beyond a certain angle. And then there is the issue of my feet.
I used to like my feet. Despite the fact that I walked everywhere as a child (my mother was a fond believer in urban rambling) my feet also seemed 'soft', even near the ball of my foot. My toes have been termed 'prehensile' in the past, but I like them, as they're useful for lifting things about when I can't be bothered to get up (i.e. most of the time). I do not remember there being any blemishes on my toes, and save one broken toe caused by attempting to karate kick my cousin (and missing) I rarely had any problems with my feet.
Well, in the last five or so years things have changed. My feet smell terrible, the skin has deterioated so now I have horribly hardened and tough skin and there are random calluses which never ever seem to go away.
These problems have accelerated recently since a couple of weeks ago my boots broke. The sole split completely which led to a strange shifting of weight leading to additional pain and general feet related badness.
Naturally I attempted to repair them. First with super glue, then with a oven stove and a hot knife. Then I moved onto araldite and finally thought about using a hammer, some nails and a mecano piece. Then I gave up in failure.
I was going to leave it for a couple of months when finances might allow to actuall replace my shoes, but instead I did the rational thing and went to my friendly local pawn brokers / loan-'till-payday / soul draining merchants and borrowed money at 200%+ interest rate. While I waited for this transaction to take place the shop was robbed (nothing particularly dramatic, someone just grabbed some jewellery and ran off down the Walworth Road) which led to spending a little under an hour in the shop as the police were called and the place locked up.
Still, once that was finished I travelled to Camden to buy a new pair of boots, pretty much the same ones as before - albeit slightly plainer.
As I have noted before having new boots is kind of like an ongoing battle between flesh and leather. Your foot will creak and blister against the shoe which in turn, will eventually break and give way. The problem is in the mean time your foot is in some pain. And thus they were.
Naturally, this occurred the weekend that I was doing a Fire Walk for Phoenix House in Tooting Broadway.
When I originally volunteered for this I hadn't given much thought to what was involved. Somewhat naively I just presumed you turned up, walked over some hot coals, and then sod off home. This wasn't the case.
Instead, there was a two and a half hour training session run by a martial arts practioner of some sorts. It was familiar territory (achieving new things through positive thinking, visualising your goals being completed, etc) but there was also a Derren Brown esque 'How to weaken someone's arm using a Jedi mind trick'. Well, almost. It got me thinking about a few things, and I pretty much assume I'm a ninja now.
I was fairly unphased by the whole thing, despite the fact the instructor kept telling us over and over again that it's 1263 Fahrenheit or something like that. I mean, physics yada yada yada. Heat transferrance is so slow, you don't actually get hot and it's all good. Admittedly when I saw the actual flames I was momentarily thoughtful, but then realied the worst that could happen would be I might suffer horrific third degree burns, and that would presumably get me ages off work.
Anyway, after the training session I did the walk which as Debbie has noted before was a bit of a non-event. Below is a picture, althought it was a bit dark. Thanks to Olly for the photo and the rest of the gang for coming out to witness this, although God knows why they did.
I'd like to do similar activities, except perhaps more advanced. The glass walk just sounds like the same principle, so perhaps something like bending a needle through your skin or whatever it is. Perhaps bungee jumping? I'm no longer apprehensive of needles (thank you Guys Drug Research Unit) so I suppose I have to go find some other stuff to confront. Not laziness, obviously - that might be a step too far.
As a final point : My feet were somewhat blackened by the experience, but otherwise unharmed. Unfortunately yesterday I ran for the train in my new boots and my feet are in agony now. So : Walking on hot coals is considerably less painful than travelling by public transport."
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