Nothing torpedoed a birthday like an automated greetings card from Bradford and Bingley. Maybe I was being ungrateful, but even at the age of 4 or 5, I was pretty sure that whatever they had written in that card, they didn't mean it. Probably through some ancient survival instinct kicking in, you could feel that either Bradford or Bingley (probably Bingley, Bradford being too busy schmoozing with high level investors to be thinking about birthdays or children) had really just interjected into your celebrations for any new cash on the go.
If they had been more blatant, fine. A simple letter observing the likelihood of an individual's date of birth coinciding with a sudden influx of capital which would then go on to explain the mutual benefits of my temporarily lending said capital to their organisation would have appealed to me (being, as I was, a terrifying emotionless robot from the future, even back then). They sent instead a note from that gurning yellow cartoon cat from the 80's, doing the same cartwheels he had done for every other 5 year old while avoiding ever mentioning why his employers had saw fit to deploy him in my direction (he also saw fit to continually remind me that I was 'in his club', the benefits of which were the birthday card, and a terrible rate of interest. I'm pretty sure I also had to pay to be in that club).
So it's nice that they've stopped - being insincerely reminded of financial responsibility via lab-generated whimsy on your only special yearly day could've had an entirely different effect on me as an adult. But it could so easily be so much worse than just that. It's perfectly conceivable that, with all the personal information that's floating around at the moment (Broken Britain etc.), you could receive targeted greetings for things like going-on-holiday, buying a new fridge (bigger fridge, implied bigger family, is Grandad moving in? Congratulations!?!), a new job, even what your Amazon purchases imply (and the subsequent apology letters for drawing the wrong conclusions from your Amazon purchases). Letters from Interflora when they think that you're in love, letters from Ben and Jerry's when it wasn't reciprocal.
Yes, I know - this already exists, to an extent, but it's all done via email, and therefore easy to mentally filter. If it were done physically, and personally (i.e. a man employed by every company to write greetings cards all day), it would have greater resonance. Primarily, it would create a whole swathe of new jobs (and in the greetings card writing sector, itself suffering retractions as a result of the boom in online personalisation) which could easily be state funded, to an extent. Better than that, on receiving such a card, you would know that it had been penned by someone equally, if not more, disenchanted with the sending company as you are, forming a bond between distant men like no other. Which, in a kind of self defeating way, would only humanise said sending conglomerate even more. Still, at least there would be a genuinely human element in the process, drastically increasing the chances of there being a memorably sweary "f*ck your job!" mass birthday card send out from a disgruntled employee to a generation of 7 year olds, who would subsequently never quite believe that it didn't in fact come from the pilot of Thunderbird 2 on behalf of the Woolwich. THAT would be a birthday.
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