Today is my birthday. Yes, you most likely ‘forgot’ because you did not notice it on your Facebook Birthday list. Well, it was actually deliberate. I removed my birthday from my profile because I wanted to relive the feeling of the good old days when the conversation went like this
Well wisher: Happy birthday!
Celebrant: Wow you remembered. Thank you *Grinning from ear to ear*
You see, the advent of Facebook heralded the era of automating the wishing of Happy Birthday and took away that pleasant feeling knowing someone spared some brain cells to actually remember your special day.
Some 2 birthdays ago, I received about 200 birthday wishes from my barely 1k Facebook friends. Last year was the eye opener, although I received about 400, a vast majority looked automated.
“Happy Birthday bro! have a nice one”
The one that killed it for me was ‘HBD’. Yup, you got that right, there was no time to spell out ‘Happy’
So this Year, with my 2k+ Facebook contacts, I decided to do something different. Rather than get 1000 HBD’s which would be copied and pasted on the walls of my Birthday mates, I decided to remove the date to see who would remember.
The result was not surprising.
The first half of the day had less than 10 people writing on my wall (I would have gotten that number 24 hours to my birthday, had it been listed). by evening, the number started picking up (to about 27) due to the posts on my wall flowing to the streams of Facebook friends.
So I can authoritatively say that by not listing your birthday on your Facebook profile, the happy birthday posts will be 5% of what you would normally get.
This was just an experiment of a bored mind.
Thanks to all those that remembered. called, sent texts, and wrote on my wall. It is greatly appreciated. After all, you had a clear choice not to.
For those of you that forgot, you’ve got 2hrs left 🙂
New year, new resolution
Unlike last year, I will not list a litany of resolutions, I will keep it simple.
- Focus and finish any project I start.
- Keep my confidence and integrity in tact
- Make real effort to become more religious
- Enjoy life.
Everything else will fall into place.
I am really feeling old at 23*
*Not a typo 🙂