Birthdays at the Office

by Mike Dang

This series is brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition.

On my eighth day of work, the cupcakes showed up.

I had just started a job as an editor at a startup run by a bunch of 20-year-olds. At the time, our CEO was 25, the startup didn’t have a name yet, and we were all working out of a makeshift office near Times Square at a computer learning center called New Horizons. We were barely paid, but the recession had just hit, and we were all just glad to have health insurance and a place to go to every morning. There were also free cookies, because every day at 2 p.m., a New Horizons employee would hand them out to everyone on our floor. We had all just returned from our cookie break when I saw the cupcakes.

“Is it someone’s birthday?” I asked. “I love office birthdays!”

It turned out we were celebrating my managing editor Sharon’s birthday, and she later took me aside. “Do you want to put everyone’s birthday in your calendar so we won’t forget anyone this year?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Great, I’ll send you a list!”

And that’s how I accidentally came to run a one-man party planning committee.

•••

Irene’s birthday came two weeks later. She was Russian, wore six-inch stiletto heels to work every day, and constantly talked about all the great guys she met while clubbing every weekend. I bought her a $35 bottle of Grey Goose and tied a silver bow around it. A few of us gathered around her desk, handed her the bottle and watched as she giggled and said, “How did you know?”

Three weeks after that, another birthday popped up in my calendar. It was for a coworker we all called J-Dye, and for her birthday, I got her a Netflix subscription, decorated her desk, and brought in a chocolate cake from our favorite pastry shop near the office.

Jon’s birthday was the following week. Jon was the sort of person who spent his work hours watching Netflix movies at his desk, and we once watched him go into the conference room to take a four-hour nap because he had wandered into the office at 3 a.m. to — well, I’m not quite sure — but by the time we all arrived for work, he was ready for some shuteye. For his birthday, I bought him a case of Red Bull, and we all stood around and watched him blow out candles on a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake.

By the time Adam’s birthday showed up in my calendar two weeks later, we were starting to get tired of the birthday routine, so I hatched a harebrained plan to bring a street performer into the office.

At the time, my roommate Beth had a Japanese friend coming to stay with us named Mimi who was a multitalented street performer and a backup ice dancer for Oksana Baiul. She was flying to New York from Berlin, where she had taken what she described in an email as a “flying workshop.” She wrote that she was also doing a new “fire act,” and she ended her email with, “say hello to Mike.” She would end a lot of her emails to Beth that way — “say hello to Mike” — because she had once tried to seduce me into marrying her so she could get a Green Card. I vehemently turned down her proposal because I didn’t want to participate in a sham marriage, and also because I was terrified of Mimi in the same way that I was terrified of any woman or man who had ever expressed any interest in me. But if Mimi was going to be crashing with us and performing on the streets of New York, I thought I might as well hire her to put on one of her acts at the office for Adam’s birthday.

“I want to hire Mimi to do something for 15 minutes in our office,” I told Beth. “Do you think this is possible?”

“I’ll ask her,” Beth said. “I know she can belly dance, and she also has a red full-body slinky-looking suit she can dance in.”

“Okay, nothing too sensual though,” I said after considering what that would look like.

Mimi agreed to do a performance, but a few days before Adam’s birthday, Mimi was detained at the airport, interrogated, and then deported back to Germany, where she had a work visa. “I will miss you,” Mimi wrote to Beth. “Say goodbye to Mike.”

Rather than ditching my plan and buying Adam a cake like I should have, I decided to place an ad on Craigslist:

Juggler wanted on Feb 15th (Murray Hill)

I’m looking for someone who can perform a 5–10 minute juggling act in my office as a surprise for one of my coworkers for his birthday. I’m just looking for some good ol’ fashion juggling, a non-professional would be fine. You just need to be available for a 10-minute time-slot anytime on the 15th between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. and won’t have to stay an longer than that. My budget is small, but I only need a few minutes, and would even take a student who just learned how to juggle.

Jacob, a 17-year-old hoping to get a job as a juggler in the Big Apple Circus, was the first and only person to respond to my ad.

“I’m planning on bringing my own juggling equipment,” Jacob wrote in an email to me. “Tell me more about what you want to surprise your coworker with. Do you want something less formal, or do you want a 10-minute variety act (e.g. music, costumes, etc.) taking place in the office and creating a kind of surreal image? Do you want something silent or something talking? Finally, how high are the ceilings in the space? Also, how big is the area this juggling will take place in? Thanks a lot — Jacob.”

I had no idea what what Jacob meant by creating a surreal image, so I just replied to his email with the size of the office, and restated that I was simply looking for some good ol’ fashion juggling. When I asked Jacob how much he wanted, he said he’d take $20 and a letter of recommendation for the circus. Sold.

Jacob showed up to the office on Adam’s birthday wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a bag of equipment slung over his shoulder. One of the investors in our startup had showed up that day for a surprise meeting with our CEO, so I hid with Jacob in a hallway bathroom until the investor left.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked.

Jacob smiled, swung the bag off his shoulder, and zipped the bag open. He showed me his juggler’s balls, bowling pins, and a set of large shiny knives.

“You’re going to juggle knives?!” I blurted.

“Yeah, I’m pretty good at it,” he said.

“Pretty good?”

One of my coworkers knocked on the door to let us know the coast was clear, so Jacob stuffed his knives back in his bag and we made our way over to Adam’s desk.

Adam looked up at me, and I realized that all I really knew about him were the things I’d learned two months ago during our team-building exercises. Adam liked R.E.M., David Sedaris, and This American Life. Perhaps he would also like to see a 17-year-old juggle knives?

“Adam, you know what today is, right?” I asked. “Happy birthday, we got you a juggler!”

Everyone in the office exploded into laughter, and Adam said something like, “Wait, what?”

Jacob was impressive. We put on some music, and he juggled three balls, then four, then six, then eight, then 10. He balanced one bowling pin on his nose while juggling four others. Everyone clapped and cheered, and then Jacob pulled out his knives.

“Mike, come over here and sit below me,” Jacob said. “I’m going to juggle these over you.”

I squatted down under Jacob and shut my eyes. Jacob started juggling, everyone laughed and screamed, and it was probably amazing, but I was too petrified to look up.

When Jacob was done, I stood up and we all applauded. Adam, flabbergasted, didn’t know what to say. I asked Adam recently what he thought of the whole situation and he said, “I remember thinking it was super thoughtful. I didn’t know you personally well enough yet to think of this as your own insane plan. Your pathologies about going all-out for parties, and your selflessness and insane self-effacing-ness were not yet totally clear.” I took that as a compliment.

I walked Jacob to the elevator and gave him $50.

“You were amazing,” I said. “Thank you for not killing me.” I later wrote that in my letter or recommendation for Jacob to the Big Apple Circus: Jacob was amazing. He juggled knives over me and managed not to kill me.

Previously: Asking for a Raise: A Series of Conversations.

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Mike Dang wants to celebrate your birthday.

Photo by Matt Antonino, via Shutterstock