Birthday, Schmirthday.

Good Evening:

i do not believe in birthdays boss

and if you knew as many of them as i do

you would not believe in them

either

And with that homage to-slash-borderline plagiarism of Don Marquis (archy and mehitabel) out of the way, I can gripe about my birthday.

Now my co-workers did not mind my birthday; as I have written before, they really really like to eat, and they welcome any chance to indulge in a nice big box of donuts. Since one of my associates sprang for the dozen, it would have been poor form for me not to join in the festivities (birthdays are not supposed to make you happy, birthdays are supposed to make your friends happy) so I cheerfully obliged myself to indulge in a few. You know, for the sake of morale. My optometrist also sent birthday greetings via email, which I rather liked; even though nowadays all you have to do is enter the info into a database and it will take care of the rest, birthday greetings are a tradition that this third generation family-owned business has kept up for over a century.

But I don’t want my ATM to wish me a happy birthday.

First of all, my ATM doesn’t even know my exact birthday; it started wishing me blah blah blah a week ago, and will probably continue for another week. Second of all, it doesn’t know who I am. My optometrist from the third generation family-owned business can recognize me on the street; not one employee of my bank (not to mention my ATM) can make the same claim. How can they? I have not seen the inside of a bank branch in months. It angrifies my innards when some corporation’s vast IT operation attempts to conceal the fact that ultimately that corporation remains nothing but a money sucking entity sucking my money out of my entity by pretending to be a hail-fellow well-met friendly good neighbor  good friend type person, or something like that.

It’s not even a machine. It’s just an algorithm generating a message on a machine.

Besides, as faithful readers of The San Francsico Scene–Seen! can attest, I don’t celebrate my schmirthday (or Barf Day, as one friend says, or F*** Day, as another friend says), I celebrate what I call Freedom Day.

Oh, well. Onward deeper into the second half of my life.

but its cheerio my deario

theres a dance in the old chrome dome yet

Sorry, Don.

Vonn Scott Bair

PS–My age, you ask? You will find the answer I shall use for the rest of my life here.