Yesterday was my friend J.’s 40th birthday. J. is on a pretty close-knit team in my department, but they also have this comically adversarial relationship with each other, playing practical jokes on each other and so forth. J. had made the mistake of letting slip when his birthday was, so yesterday at 2 pm his cow-orkers D. and L. gathered a bunch of people together and we all surprised him by walking up to his office singing Happy Birthday. L. even bought a cake and got it inscribed “Happy Birthday Old Man!” š
J. is someone who appreciates some good verbal abuse jousting, so we made sure not to let him down on that front. It’s almost too easy since D. and L. are both recent college grads. At one point D. and J. were sitting in adjoining chairs and I said, “It’s like you two are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures.”
Tonight hopefully I can further celebrate J.’s birthday by taking some of his money at poker!
But seriously, J. is a good guy, a fellow science fiction geek, and I wish him the best. Especially if doing so means he won’t pull the same thing on me on my 40th!