Casey Recommends: Taking Your Birthday Off

To be clear: today is not my birthday. If it were, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this. I’d be somewhere that’s not my office, doing something not remotely close to anything that could be construed as work.

But. It is apparently not so common to be a person who holds their birthday as sacrosanct — a day that one should never be forced to deal with others’ shenanigans.

I say this because one of my Quiet Job coworkers showed up to the store last week on his 60th birthday. He chose to work a Saturday retail shift on a milestone birthday! And he’s not the only one. Another coworker had asked to swap shifts a few months ago because she forgot to request her birthday as a day off.

This, in my life, is unacceptable. Lemongrab-style unacceptable.

Ever since my college days, I’ve had a standing rule that I do not work on my birthday. This is a rule that has served me well for nearly 30 years, and it’s something I encourage everyone to adopt.

It’s not a rule that means you have to do something big and extravagant. There’s no party requirement. There’s no splurge requirement. You don’t have to go to Disney World (though I have done that once).

You don’t even have to involve any other people in whatever you’re doing! The only rule is to take the day off and do something you WANT to instead of something you HAVE to.

Personally, I don’t like the whole world knowing and acknowledging my birthday. I don’t do parties. I only want to do something fun. And because my birthday doesn’t fall near any major holiday, why not use it as an excuse to get out of Dodge and have a little adventure?

Some of my recent birthday excursions have included:

• a compass navigation class
• a walk around the Gateway National Recreation Area
• a trip to the TWA Hotel
• and my personal best, and one that will be very very hard to top, I fear — a jump into A COLD HOLE at MASS MoCA

Can you imagine if every company made it mandatory for its employees to take their birthdays off? The birthday person wouldn’t have to tell anyone except whoever is in charge of scheduling. There would be no sad breakroom cake. No hoopla. And no meetings on the calendar!

Everyone would just get one extra gratis PTO day, no strings attached. A gal can dream.

So I encourage you to go ahead and take your birthday off — even if you are your own boss! — and see how wonderful a free day can be. Life is hard enough: we should all get one day for ourselves.