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When I was about 17 I decided to test just how much you could find out about someone on the internet so I picked a random Twitter famous person and decided to see what I could find out about them. And with very little digging, just knowing their first and last name, their age, what city they live in, and what college they went to, I was able to find their full name, the full names of their parents, and their dad’s address, which I looked up on Google earth and saw that it looked exactly like pictures and videos that they had taken in front of their dad’s house.

All this I found as a person who had never tried doing this before in less than twenty minutes. And it freaked me out. A lot. I still live with guilt about doing that and haven’t tried doing it since but not everyone has the same morals that I do. Some people are willing to dig for more than twenty minutes. Some people are willing to make phone calls and go to where you work. And a lot of these people don’t have good intentions.

The next day she came in with my ENTIRE star chart with personality tropes, life advice, predicitons for my future and so on. Now, I don’t go in for Astrology but I can tell when someone is making a well-meaning gesture and I can say “Thank you” and shut up.

Especially because I told her the Wrong Birthday.

See, my birthday is in the middle of a cluster of a whole bunch of family birthdays and growing up I used to have to share my Birthday with my older cousins and while that’s not really a big deal (even fun if you’re older) it kinda sucks when you’re five and none of your cousins share your interests.

So mom made a deal with me: We’d celebrate my “Un-Birthday” in January, when nobody else in the family has a birthday or anything else, and the “real” birthday would be my Cousin’s. I got my own birthday and they got a second party and it was fun.

As I got older, I just started using my Un-Birthday for everything except paperwork, becuase January is boring and bereft of holidays except the one that’s really part of Xmas these days. On paperwork, I put my real one, but I’ve been celebrating my birthday in the wrong month for over 25 years now, and didn’t think about it when she asked, and told her my Un-Birthday.

And for a few weeks everything was fine.

But Debbie had a RIVAL.

Another woman in the office “Sharon” was also big into Astrology and was convinced Debbie was Doing It Wrong, so when she was going over payroll, she saw my Legal Birthday, realized Debbie had filled out the chart wrong, and then proceded to drag Debbie on the company facebook group, and a bunch of astrology groups they were both in.

I found out when I came in three days later from a long weekend and Debbie burst into tears and sobbed “HOW COULD YOU LIE TO MEEEEEE???”

After an extremely garbled recounting by our coworkers, a talk with my manager about “Hey yeah I don’t think it’s Legal for Sharon to take my name and date of birth from Payroll and put it all over facebook?”, the manager had a talk about “I know you are all over 50 but this is NOT WHAT THE COMPANY FACEBOOK IS FOR”, Sharon was ‘removed from the premesis’ and I finally got to sit down with Debbie.

I explained the slip-up and how I sort of have two birthdays and think of the January Birthday is my “Real” one.

Debie looked up from where she’d been sobbing into her tissue all morning, realization dawning on her less like the illumination of the sun and more like a baby sea turtle headed in the wrong direction because of light Pollution.

“Oh!” She said “You’re TRANS-ZODIAC! You might have been born as an Aries, but you’re really a Capricorn!”

As someone who’s been hit by a minivan and gotten a minor skull fracture from it, I’m pretty sure hearing that sentence gave me more brain damage.