Tomorrow is our monthly "Employee Birthday Jamboree!" at work where we fete the various drones in our department for managing to be born in this particular month. Way to go, Aprilites! Your fathers sure . . . uh . . . fucked your mothers probably in August! Woo!

It's really depressing in a lot of ways. For one thing, office "parties." This is really shorthand for "people standing around awkwardly in a hallway." We used to have a conference room for this sort of shit, but since we moved floors some time back, we don't really have anything to use any more. Not that the conference room was cheery in any respect: it was a windowless chamber with, well, a big table. Everyone sat up against the walls and stared at the wan donut assortment as if they were boxes of severed horse penises. Now, we don't have to stand in a Sartrean conference room any more--we actually have an outside balcony. However, since nine months out of the year, the balcony is whipped with icy rain or bone-slicing wind, or both, we usually end up standing in the hallway staring out at the Gehenna balcony where Judas is buried up to his neck in ice and screams mutely at us through double-paned windows. We still eat donuts. I'm pretty sure Judas wants our donuts, but hey. Fuck you, Judas.

These birthday extravaganzas ("Now with more sullenly signed cards!") are the responsibility of the department leads, of which I am one. We routinely put these off until the last possible minute, of course, because it's always just so dismal. These things are like a preview of your own funeral. "Yeah, happy birthday, Tim." "My name is Todd." "That's awesome. Hey, is this a Bavarian cream?" Just people standing around, pretending to interact meaningfully, when really, all your brain is on whether or not you'll look like a dick for taking the last gherkin.

Happy birthday, April nobodies! Are you going to eat that?