Unintended birthday gifts

[J Peters]

I was looking at my facebook memories recently, seeing that I've had
some unexpected, unintended, birthday gifts over the years.

8 years ago, I got an ambulance ride. I had a concussion, from getting
knocked down by a someone doing a practice start out of lane 1. (I was
a finish judge.) My cousin commented on that one, "Worst Birthday
Present Ever")

5 years ago, we were at Wrigley field, and the cast of Hamilton in
Chicago happened to be doing the 7th inning stretch that night. They
did it so well, with tight harmony, like the performance pros that they are.

And this year, I got a colon cancer screening kit from University of
Chicago Medical Center. I'm overdue for a screening, so they sent me
the at home version. They are determined to see to my health, I guess.

Gemini, in Chicago, getting older.

[Skatha]

That's a lot more eventful from any of my birthdays! The most I can remember is the tree between my place and my neighbors' that calmly cracked and fell over first thing in the morning last year.

*Skatha, waving from Wisconsin*

[lkosov]

I've--knock on wood--mostly avoided unintentional cosmic birthday gifts,
thus far. Had a couple of power outages, but it's hard to take those
personally.

I did get a job offer on my birthday once, though. I was young and naive,
had interviewed with the HR person a week or so before; the interview had
gone reasonably well, though they were very vague on the details. "I'm
afraid I'm not a computer person," they said; "normally the person you'd
report to would be with me for this interview, but his wife's water broke
this morning." The position, I told, was database administrator / IT
support / other duties as required. "45% database admin, 45% IT support,
10% clerical and miscellaneous work." They said they were a fast-growing
technology company that developed and marketed customized enterprise
hardware.

They called on my birthday, offered me the job; I accepted and started two
weeks later.

They were actually a cult/MLM scheme peddling "herbal supplements", and
their idea of "database administration" was manually reviewing and fixing
Excel spreadsheet lists of people they'd bought from some data broker or
something. I started on Monday and did not return on Tuesday.

--
Live, Learn, Leg It Out Of There

[Skatha]

Yikes! Glad you hoofed it!

I'm curious, though - since you added the 'cult' description, how cultlike was it (aside from the usual MLM insanity)? WHO WAS THE SUPPLEMENT GOD?

[lkosov]

On Fri, 2 Jul 2021, Skatha wrote:

> I'm curious, though - since you added the 'cult' description, how
> cultlike was it (aside from the usual MLM insanity)? WHO WAS THE
> SUPPLEMENT GOD?

I was literally there a day so I didn't get a really in-depth
indoctrination into the whole thing, but they were all about "energy
inbalances", as I remember; all your problems in life were symptoms of
your critical levels of three types of energy being out of balance, and
the Only Guaranteed Way(TM) to restore that balance was to buy and consume
their products.

What I remember being struck by was how, when lunch time came, everyone
unpacked their lunches and then, like, noted down in little notebooks how
much what they were eating was going to affect their energies, and how.
There was no "hmm, if microwave Easy Mac is going to throw my energy out
of alignment maybe I should eat something else" sort of mentality, any
real desire for active self-betterment. It was like "Well, this is gonna
require three packages of (whatever product they sold) to counteract, so
be it, gotta be sure to make a note of it."

I only met her for about thirty seconds but the Suplement Goddess was a
soccer mom who'd inherited the knowledge of life energy or whatever they
called it from her ancestors. Allegedly, anyway. I forget how people
referred to her, but it was something weird and ungrammatical. I wish I
could remember what it was; it was something like referring to her as
"Leader", but always in the plural - "Leader are going to...", maybe.
Maybe her ancestors were inside her, or something.

[Skatha]

Whooooooaaaaa yeah it's good you got out of that place!
(My mother's big into supplements and conspiracy theories lately, but this makes her sound practically normal, whew!)