Birthday Alarm

Last year, I started getting those 'Birthday Alarm' e-mails in my inbox. For those conservative consumers who haven't yet heard, 'Birthday Alarm' "sets FREE reminders so that you never forget a birthday again!" However, although the concept of Birthday Alarm is all well and good, the details have faults. In this case, the small print isn't even printed.

To begin with, here's a little backround information: Birthday Alarm is a service that, with your permission, sends an e-mail to everybody in your address book that requests all this personal information, including your year, month, and day of birth. Then, on that special day, an e-mail is sent to you reminding you it is your friend's b-day.

The problem is, the e-mail is sent on the birthday. Which gives you about enough time to send a belated birthday card and apologize. If this free service is truly for the greater good of American Citizens, wouldn't it make more sense to send the e-mail three days in advance?

An appreciative friend is going to make you feel a little guilty when he/she thanks you for remembering his/her special day. There's a little George Washington in everyone, so what exactly can you say? "Oh, I didn't remember, an automatic internet service sent me an e-mail to remind me." Half the point of a b-day card is to show a friend that you were thinking of them. "Actually, I wasn't thinking of you until I checked my e-mail." Smooth.

I was a late riser. I didn't come along until the early 1990s, which means I'm too young to use Birthday Alarm. So far as I know, I can ask it to send the e-mail, but when it's sent to me I can either screw it and be forgotten on my special day, or lie and say I was born somewhere in the 1980s. Which upsets Washington.

So far as I know, we all got along fine before Birthday Alarm came along. Close friends don't even send birthday cards. That's something relitives in Ohio do. And they never remember anyway.