WHEN INSPIRATION STRIKES!

How the virus has spawned new and creative office birthdays

In most offices I’ve worked in, birthdays have been celebrated by a group card and gathering for cake. When I joined the marketing and communications team at a new company, however, I discovered that birthdays were taken to another level and tapped into everyone’s creativity.

For example, we reworked our company’s ads to feature the birthday person’s face and personalized tagline and made an album cover with all of our team’s inside jokes printed as a track list on the back.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. My birthday fell the same week everything abruptly closed and we all started to shelter in place. But while the office might have shut down, the ingenuity of my co-workers did not.

My birthday fell on a Saturday last year. I had the day all planned out—get a relaxing massage, meet up with friends for dinner and then go to see the much raved about Hamilton musical. I could not wait!

But as the COVID virus began to spread, one by one, each of those activities was cancelled. On the day before my birthday, I was a little bummed out that I couldn’t do any of the things I had planned. My spirits were lifted, however, when my colleagues sent me something very special to commemorate my birthday.

With everyone working at home, I hadn’t

expected anything at all from them. But, working with such a thoughtful and talented group, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that they would do something unique for me.

One of my co-workers makes podcasts for our company and decided to rework the regular intro and format of her podcast to be a birthday podcast for me, featuring greetings from everyone on the team.

I was so blown away by the time and effort she and everyone else put into it. Their messages made me smile, laugh out loud and even tear up at a few times. It was genuinely one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever received.

As the pandemic continued, so did more birthdays on our team. Well, a podcast was done for me, so we had to do something different for the next person. My teammate with the technical skills to do video editing had the idea of stitching together birthday greetings we each recorded for our co-worker on our phones. She even included Stevie Wonder’s song Happy Birthday in the background. Another success!

We’d surely be back in the office for the next person’s birthday, right? Wrong. So, what next?

Our director had mentioned that there is a service called Cameo, which offers video messages from celebrities for a fee, with proceeds at that time going to Covid-related causes.

All of the women on our team love the TV show Jane the Virgin, so one of my colleagues used an audio clip from a character on the show in her podcast message for me. So, to return the favour, we arranged for that actor to create a personalized birthday message for her (based off of the facts we provided), through the Cameo service.

We presented it to my colleague during one of our virtual team meetings. Her reaction of initial confusion and then ultimate surprise when she realized this TV actor was giving her a personalized birthday greeting brought us absolute joy.

While my work family could have gone the traditional route of doing Zoom birthday celebrations or sending an e-card, we instead came together to do something creative to make everyone’s birthday special. How can we ever go back to a birthday card and cake in the office again? n