The Machinery of Night

Posted 8:54 PM by Angie Schultz

You Say It's Your Birthday...

This happened to me once. For the techno-have-nots among you, that's Bush getting birthday greetings from the White House press corps. A reporter mentions that it's his birthday, too, and Bush invites him to come up on the podium. And then another, and another reporter claims to have a birthday, and pretty soon all the reporters are up there on the podium, and there's no one in the audience. What are the odds??

Ha ha, no. They stopped at three reporters. I was at a conference once where it was announced that one of the mucky-mucks was having a birthday. Someone else said, "Why, it's my birthday, too!" That got the people at our table asking, "What are the odds?" (quite good, really) and "What are the odds of there being three in the group with the same birthday?" I told them they better get calculating, because I was the third person. This prompted my boss to embarrass me by announcing it to the room at large.

The moral is: always keep your mouth shut about your birthday, lest you wind up shaking hands with the President on national TV.