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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

I don't like strangers using my name. Police do that, debt collectors do that. Flight attendants and waiters should not do that.

I think it's an information asymmetry thing. I don't like it when people know more about me than the other way round, or at least don't like it when they make it obvious.

And specifically with birthdays. I'd be pretty annoyed if flight attendants started wishing me happy birthday, I hate it when people do that. I like to keep my birthday a private event. I barely tolerate work buying me a cake and singing happy birthday, and that's just because I get cake and everyone else in the office enjoys the whole thing.

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I'd hate the birthday greeting, because it would be completely insincere. The staff don't know you, they couldn't care less about your birthday and they're only saying it because their computer told them to. And yet the airline thinks I'm going to be impressed by the greeting?

I'm positive that a significant amount of people will be genuinely impressed by it.

I have heard people rave about stuff like that. I think it's a Wizard of Oz type of thing. Once you pull back the curtain, the magic is lost. For us, the curtain is non-existent. For people who aren't familiar with computer systems, the technology is indistinguishable from magic.

People who aren't familiar with calendars?

There’s a big difference between understanding how calendars work and gathering the date of birth on whole populations of people and positively identifying each one.

I guess I would still be impressed, not by the sincerity of the greeting, but by the fact that the airline pays enough attention to the small details to actually train attendants to care about passengers birthdays among all the other things they have to do.

I deliberately didn't sign up for my workplace birthday planning calendar. I chipped in for others birthdays but didn't feel any need to get my turn. So they made mine April 1st.

Touché.

Ours was kept in a Microsoft Word file, so there was no automatic error checking. For years, I got away with telling them it was "February 30th." I'd rattle it off so easily, no one questioned it. We got a new admin assistant who caught it and then went through personnel files to put the list together.

Nice. I hope you went with Feb 29th after that which does exist. Means you only get the annoying birthday greetings once every four years.

Actually, I told them to take my name out or I'd file a complaint about going through personnel files and extracting birthday information as a privacy issue. (When that was done, they wrote down the year, as well.)

+1 for GDPR!

When i used to visit online forums, all of them made you register and put in your birthday. I think April 1st was the easiest date to choose. So every April 1st, I used to get tons of emails from forums telling me Happy Birthday.

It's okay if they call me Mr [Surname] but not if they use my first name. Probably some weird respect/familiarity thing.

>That's Mister Surname to you!

This has happened very rarely to me, but when it has, the head purser would usually be carrying the manifest or an iPad and clearly referencing it. That takes the creepiness out of it. It's a nice, but ultimately not terribly important, touch that they make a bit of an effort to personalise the greeting.

On one or two occasions (flying to a short stay at an outstation, and catching the same crew on the return), the attendant clearly recognised me, and made a point of saying hello, welcome back (not by name though, that would have been creepy). That's rare, and not really to be expected, though.

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