Office Birthdays Killing
My Waistline

One of the benefits of having your father in the United States Coast Guard is growing up near large bodies of water. We were, like most service families, transferred every two or three years. But unlike a lot of those other families, we never had to do any hard time in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Yay, Coast Guard!

Instead, I had the fortune to grow up near the Atlantic Ocean in Massachusetts and Virginia, near the Gulf of Mexico in Florida and Alabama, in the middle of the vast Pacific in Hawaii, and near the Great Lakes in Michigan.

A seagull over the Folly Beach Pier. Photo by Jeff Eason

Boone was really the first inland place I ever lived in my life and I’m still trying to figure out a way I can balance my love for these here mountains with the surf and sand that is ingrained in my soul.

It is no wonder that I try to spend my vacation days somewhere near the coast. I made my living for a while as a bartender in Myrtle Beach, one of the more popular destinations in the Carolinas. While it has a certain “spring break” charm, it is not my favorite seaside resort.

My favorite coastal areas of the past few years include Folly Beach (just south of Charleston), Oak Island, Atlantic Beach (NC), and Nags Head. It is to Nags Head that my wife and I will return this weekend for a visit with her mom, her sisters, and various nieces and nephews.

In preparation for this great vacation, I’ve been trying to shed the last few pounds of my winter hibernation weight. Like many of you out there, my weight fluctuates according to the season. Cold weather means indoor activities such as watching football on television while consuming large bowls of chili with shredded cheese on top and a side of Fritos corn chips. Warm weather means digging the garden and mowing the lawn. You can probably guess which season I’m prone to put on a few pounds.

Anyway, this particular summer I’ve been having a harder than usual time shedding the winter weight, and I’ve finally figured out why. It turns out we have an abnormally large number of summer babies in the High Country Media office. Since the beginning of June, at least twice a week, a mysterious voice comes over the intercom and instructs everybody in the building to meet in the reception area. Like mindless automatons, we all stop what we’re doing (deadline, schmedline), walk to the front of the building and sing “Happy Birthday” to one of our coworkers and then proceed to gorge ourselves stupid on cake, ice cream, chips and dip.

It is one of the mysteries of office work. It’s bad enough that we sit at desks for a large portion of the day with little or no exercise. But to make us eat sugary snacks in the middle of the day is a bit heartless. I tried to convince my coworkers that for my birthday we should buy something healthy to eat, like a vegetable tray with ranch dressing.

They, of course, looked at me like I had completely stripped my gears and proceeded to call the grocery store deli to tell them what to write in green-colored frosting on the top of my birthday cake. At least we ate something green.

At some point I want official government bean counters to do some serious research and find out how much all of these birthdays are costing our nation in office productivity. And it’s not just the cake and ice cream, either. Along with all of the other birthday rituals, there’s the requisite birthday card that everyone has to sign. One person is assigned birthday card courier, so you can’t expect any work out of that person for at least an hour-and-a-half. In addition to making sure that everyone signs the card, the courier also has to explain to half the office who the card is for.

“Happy Birthday Veronica? Is that the redhead in accounting or the woman who always wears turtlenecks in graphics?”

Once the card is signed and someone has made a trip to the grocery store (more lost man-hours), the ritual can start in earnest. After the intercom message instructs us to gather in a huddled mass at the front of the building, we get down to the serious matter of picking a key for singing “Happy Birthday to You.” For a simple song that we all should know by heart since childhood, it’s amazing how many truly horrid versions of “Happy Birthday” I’ve heard around the office. Folks, if you can’t sing (and you know who you are), just lip-synch for a few seconds and we’ll all be better off for it.

Considering how much time is wasted on birthdays around this office, it’s a miracle that you actually have this newspaper in your hands at all.

As I said before, I’ll be on vacation next week. So if you have a birthday and I miss it, eat some cake and ice cream for me. Thanks.