This has been one of the wierdest birthdays ever.
First off, people started wishing me several days in advance.
There were several reasons for this:
- ICQ alerts for birthdays on your friends list 2 days in advance. Most people looked at the alert, but did not look at the details and started wishing me 2 days in advance itself.
- Orkut alerts birthdays for friends about a week in advance. I started receiving happy birthday scraps a day in advance. I responded to some of these with "In which timezone?"
- Some people used their mobiles to set an alarm for the day. Unfortunately, by some quirky behaviour of electrons, they were alerted a day before, and they wished me yesterday saying, "Isn't today the 6th?"
Thankfully, my brother Rachit, along with Nikhar and DJ managed to find a cake somewhere and we had a nice family dinner Desmond's, after which the three of them somehow lifted me and gave me a tiny round of bumps, between receiving calls on my cell.
After picking up Rachit and DJ's bikes from office, we were heading home. Somewhere on the way, DJ disappeared from my rear-view mirror, and I stopped to wait for him. After some time, we figured that he got detained because tools started arbitrarily falling out of his bike's toolkit, and he stopped to pick them up.
Since I didn't feel like heading home so soon (It was only 1230 am, and it was my birthday, for crying out loud), we decided to head out for a drive (my favourite hobby). We headed towards the clover-leaf interchange on the BMIC, and went over as many of the loops as we could before heading back home.
High speeds, several drifts, a cake, and half a movie later, I went to sleep, preparing for a long day of work ahead and an early morning.
Unfortunately, different people have different ideas of how early an early morning should be, and I started getting birthday calls as early as 06:30 am, and I had to abandon sleep after barely 4 hours.
Wishes in office were freely forthcoming along with threats of bumps at 3 pm. One of the kids actually figured out how to use an SMTP server and sent out a broadcast mail from me(!) telling everyone it was my birthday and actually inviting people at 3 pm. (Kudos to whoever did this for actually copying my signature in this mail, making it appear more genuine ;)) However, nothing really materialized at 3 pm or even several hours after that. I nearly began to enjoy poking fun at my teammates for being wimps, when they finally gathered enough courage and people at around 7 pm to give me five minutes worth of bumps. Seriously, if this is all one has to bear after religiously kicking in on absolutely any birthday celebration, its totally worth it! Then again, I can safely speak such words because I have the advantage of my weight on my side.
On a more serious note, a thought that is spinning around in my head since morning: Nearly a quarter of a century, and nothing substantial to show for it. I hope I can fix this before long.
