Wow
Just had an incredible weekend. As you know, last Friday was my 21st. It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts to the day. As midnight struck, oil was still being burnt in the form of last minute efforts for a security and privacy group assignment due 5pm later in the day. The usual flow of happy birthdays arrived over ICQ, from those still awake. Wanting to know how I was going to celebrate, I just kept telling everyone to keep July 6 free. Eventually I turned into bed a bit after 2am.
I was aroused from my slumber at 7 to the surreal sound of my doorbell ringing. I groaned a bit. The bell rang again. I grunted, made a half hearted attempt to get out of bed, but then decided to try ignoring it. Who could be so obscene as to drop in on me at that hour? For the third time, the peace shattering sounds of the bell reverberated through the air. Reluctantly I stumbled to the doorphone and grunted, “Hello?”
“Hi, delivery?”
“Yep, come up.”
I answered the door obviously half asleep, shivering in the morning cold. A woman dragging along a garbage bag stood at the door. “Hi,” she said, before opening the bag, from which immediately emerged a bunch of helium balloons. “Happy Birthday!”
“Hey, wow, thank you!” I murmured, trying to sound enthused, but I think my mind was still off in dreamland.
She bid me a good day and left me standing there in the doorway, holding a bunch of psychadelic balloons, sent to me from my gf Soph. An unpleasant awakening followed by a pleasant surprise to kick off the morning.
I got into work to the tunes of, “Hey happy birthday… so how old are you? 21? Huh? What the hell are you doing at work today??” I was wondering that myself, actually. We went out to lunch to celebrate my 21st, and another colleague’s 28th (hers was for the next day). When I got back from lunch, our assignment group had officially gone into “panic mode”. New sections were still being written, other sections being proofread. There was confusion over compilation. Over 50 e-mails, with attachments, flew back and forth. Everyone was also at work, so we were juggling our uni work with work work. E-mails switched to frantic phone calls as the 5pm deadline crept closer. At one point I rang up Skye to ask her about something. During the conversation, call waiting started beeping, but I let it go. That call happened to be Grace, who rang Skye after she was unable to get through to me. So Skye was speaking to her on her work phone and to me on her mobile. Not that unusual a situation, except that Grace also happened to be talking to Kit as well (at least I think it was him)… so there was a sort of weird four-person teleconference happening in serial. Unable to negotiate a 30 minute extension on the deadline with our lecturer, Grace, being physically closest to uni, got e-mailed the final version of the assignment. She bolted into uni to hand in our 80 page report in the nick of time. All very stressful.
The plan for that evening was a quiet dinner with Soph, with my parents supposedly coming up from Camden for dinner with me on Saturday. I caught the train/bus home. Once home, waiting in the mailbox was a present from my cousin (mentioned in the previous post). It turned out to be a gift voucher for a defensive driving course. I have no doubt it was a tongue-in-cheek gift inspired by my car accident a couple months ago. That cheeky bastard. Anyway it’s a pretty neat course, they teach you how to recover from skids, take corners properly, react to other drivers on the road and so on. As the car was still at the crash repairs – after two months, they are taking a damn long time to get it repaired – Soph drove over to pick me up. We headed off for the city, and I was beginning to feel the fatigue from the stress of the assignment. We got caught in a bit of a traffic jam and I spent my time trying to explain to her how the world cup worked, but the effort spent trying to drive and comprehend sport simultaneously was just a little too much for her :). My cousin called me up asking about his present and told me he might be around in the city later so we might be able to meet up.
“Reservation for two?” Soph inquired as we walked into Tony Roma’s on Sussex St. As we were led to an upstairs, my cousin called again, “Yep I’ll definately be in the city, where and when do you want to meet?” We got to the top of the stairs and I realised that before me was a set of closed frosted glass doors. It took me a moment to realise it was a private room. However, I find it extremely hard to talk on the phone and do anything else at the same time, and I was concentrating on the phone call at that particular moment. A few steps closer and I realised there were a bunch of silhouettes behind the doors. My eyebrows furrowed and alarm bells went off in my head, but nothing clicked. As the maitre-d opened the doors, my cousin was still chattering away on the phone and I was trying to interrupt him, “Uh… Gerald… could you hold a sec, I think something is hap–“
“SURPRISE!!”
I recoiled in shock and by reflex blurted out a “Holy Shit!” as I walked straight into a room full of screaming people. It took me a good three seconds to realise (because I was still sort of on the phone) that (a) there were a helluva lot of people aiming party poppers at my head, (b) I happened to know all of these people, and finally, (c) this was a surprise birthday party. I was half asleep at the time, but it didn’t take long for that to change. I sighted Gerald in the room and it all clicked that his call was an effective ruse to distract me up until the last moment.
Throughout the rest of the night I discovered that the past 2 weeks had been an exercise in subterfuge, deception, scheming and outright lying to me. I also discovered how downright gullible and unperceptive I am (on the walk from the car park to the restaurant, we must’ve gone past at least three cars I would’ve recognised had I not been so blind). A lot of the people there were people who had previously asked me, “so, what are you doing for your birthday on Friday?” when they damn well knew what I would be doing. But it was a mind-blowingly awesome night. Tremendous surprise, definitely unforgettable. (Even the speeches, where I got absolutely roasted. My reputation was ruined… tales about assault with a torch, profanity-filled dummy spits, and the other usual 21st stories came out. Even Hear Ye! was used against me. A post on canteen prices from over four years ago, when read aloud at a 21st sounds really sad – hey, I was doing Economics in school at the time!).
A massive, gargantuan Thank You must go out to Soph, Shen and Lill who organised everything, and to Mum and Dad who funded it :). Thanks to everyone who turned up on such short notice too, much more than I would have expected for the birthday I was planning to organise for July 6 (that I thankfully won’t have to anymore heh). The effort was much more than I deserved and really means the world to me. It’s been a busy and draining few months, especially for the BITs, and this it was just such an uplifting night.
Items from the birthday stash include: a nice jacket, cap, a metal/leather chess set, levitating Yoda figurine, large Yoda lego set, Stormtrooper t-shirt, Star Trek minature starship models, Star Trek TNG Season 1 DVD set, Lian Li PC-68 computer case (mmm), cd rack, cuff links, an internally lit globe, glass crystal with laser-etching of a dragon inside, books, much needed movie vouchers, cash, etc. Hmm, I guess people caught on to the fact that I like sci-fi!
World Cup 2002
The World Cup also started on Friday and I’ve spent a lot of the weekend watching it. I entered a fantasy league and joined a league with some mates. I’m currently coming third, but it’s tight. If you have any opinions on my lineup, let me know. I’m going to transfer in some Cameroon players later, seeing that Saudi Arabia got slaughtered by Germany 8-0 on Saturday. Cameroon are the next in line to demolish the Saudis.
2:40am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
