You say it’s your birthday?

Here in the Netherlands, you do say it’s your birthday.  It is expected.  You don’t wait around to see if anyone remembers.  In this egalitarian society, everyone gets their day and they bring their own cakes into the office and throw parties for themselves EVERY YEAR, so there is no chance anyone is forgotten.  The Dutch never outgrow birthday parties,  skip the celebration or space it out to only celebrating the landmark big 0s 30,40,50…as is the custom in the US.

Another interesting thing to note is that a birthday party invitation trumps all other obligations.  There is almost no way out!  How much fun it must be to throw a surprise party for a Dutch person!  It would always be easy and they would always be shocked, because of course they would have also already planned their own party.

Today is in fact my birthday.  Usually not hung up on age, I’ll admit to not being thrilled this year.  As of today, it is no longer mathematically possible to divide the decade and remain in the mid-range of my thirties.  This realization made me feel old, until an incident last week in an undergraduate Corporate Communications Course that I was teaching put it all back into perspective.

After showing a YouTube video of a 60 minutes report “Hi- Tech Heist“, I asked what made the story so easy for the public to understand.  (I was looking for the answer, “the reporter was an old lady”.)  One eager student raised his hand and blurted out, “because they used a reporter that is your age.”  My shock and horror were immediately obvious and there was a collective gasp in the room.  The reporter was Leslie Stahl, I later looked her up and found out that she was born in 1941, even several years older than my mother!  The student was, for the first time ever, red and embarrassed and could not answer my next question.  If I were 70 years old, do you really think we’d be using YouTube for our case studies in class?”

It was a great reminder of what I already knew and believed; age is entirely relative.  As far as the students are concerned, anyone over 24 is ancient!!

Filed under Just for fun | Comment (1)