Church-type activities aside, is there a more excruciating ceremony than the singing of happy birthday? It’s a legitimate question and not one that I am asking just because I happen to be hurtling towards a particularly unwelcome milestone myself. I have recently been working for a company where it is a monthly tradition that all the staff who are celebrating a birthday that month gather in the middle of the office and the section manager leads the rest of the department in a rendition of the aforementioned song.
It’s impossible to tell who is more embarrassed – the birthday victims who are subjected to a very public reminder of another year passing and spend the duration of the singing carefully avoiding eye contact with anyone else in the room or the singers who try to deliver the words without drawing too much attention to their congenital inability to hold any sort of tune. On particularly ugly occasions after the song has, to the relief of all concerned, come to an end, some bright spark might even launch an attempt at “hip, hip, hooray†or, even worse, “for he’s a jolly good fellowâ€. It makes me wince thinking about it. The fact is that nobody enjoys the occasion so why bother doing it? Public executions were banned for much the same reason. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for celebrating a colleague’s birthday if they so wish – four hours in the pub at lunchtime is always welcome – but not by joining in with the forced jocularity of twenty adults tunelessly serenading them.
A few years ago I was in a club where, midway through the night, they actually stopped the tunes and asked everyone there to sing happy birthday to the DJ who was on the decks at the time. No doubt this was an emotional moment for the DJ and one that he will tearfully recount to his children in years to come. For everyone in the club it was five minutes of irritation before the music came back on and they could get back to the serious business of getting off their heads.
There’s a time and a place for singing Happy Birthday and that is at a party for a five year old nephew surrounded by discarded wrapping paper and jelly and ice cream, not in an office surrounded by filing cabinets and humiliation and certainly not at four in the morning in a nightclub. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating making the song illegal per se just completely socially unacceptable like drink driving and reading the Daily Mail.
Is that really too much to ask?