Birthday cards gain mileage when folks forget

Aging isn’t funny, unless we are able to laugh at our own selves.

There’s a certain group of special and particularly social senior people I know, who celebrate their collective birthdays every month. They gather for supper once a month to honor those who are having birthdays. They do the whole cake and candles thing. And they give each other birthday cards.

Greeting cards - public domain photo

But here’s the funny part.

These folks don’t actually sign the birthday cards. Instead, they sign little sticky notes and tuck them into the cards.

“That way, we can reuse the cards next month,” one participant told me. “Greeting cards are pricey these days, so each card becomes like a gift in itself. And most of us won’t remember it anyway.”

It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s kind of like re-gifting, only a little less tacky. Or maybe more tacky, if you consider the sticky on the notes. (Sorry, had to.)

Stop me, if you’ve heard this one.

Last year, a friend sent me a birthday card that read: “We’ll be friends until we’re old. Then we’ll be new friends again.”

I’m not knocking people who have actual medically diagnosed memory loss issues. It’s just that most of us forget stuff all the time, especially as we grow older. It’s like the old “hereafter” joke: “I find myself thinking more and more about the hereafter. Like I come upstairs and wonder, What did I come up here after?”

By the way, I just had a milestone birthday. But none of my cards contained sticky notes. So I guess I’ll have to buy some new cards for this month’s slew of birthdays.

Maybe going Post-It makes sense.

Images:

Public domain  photo

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Phone scam: Cops don’t announce your arrest in a text.

Hello, random smart phone user. Guess what. The cops are after you. Really?

What do you do, if you suddenly receive an ominous-sounding text message, apparently informing you that you will soon be apprehended by the police? 

Wait. Let’s clarify that.

What if you receive such a shocking message, and you have not actually committed a crime?

This happened to me recently.

At first, I did a double-take. I admit it. Then I plunked the first line of the mysterious text message into an internet search bar and found a long list of scam reports.

This rather prevalent sort of message usually goes something like this:

“________ get expired after that you will be taken into custody by the local cops as there are ___ serious allegations pressed on your name at this moment we would request you to get back to us so that we can discuss about this case before taking any legal action against you the number to reach us is 555-555-5555 I repeat 555-555-5555 thank you.”

Whew! Can you say, “run-on sentence”? And has anyone ever heard of punctuation or capitalization? And what about redundant phrasing? The grammarian in me is dying over this one.

It’s not exactly delightful. In fact, it’s far from it. But something is definitely amiss. And it’s not my legal record – or yours. 

And at least in my town, the police are much more likely to come a-knocking than a-texting, if they have grounds for picking up a criminal.

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