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James Cridland's blog

Where radio and new platforms collide. With beer.

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Birthday greetings

Posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 8:54pm. #

As you might have spotted from my previous post, I’ve been on holiday. (There’s one of my favourite pictures: taken on my trusty Fuji, then post-processed in picnik.com before being posted on Flickr).

The reason for the quick holiday break? It’s my birthday tomorrow (Sunday). Why, thanks. Very kind. Anyway, given the amount of websites I must have punched my birthday details into, I wonder what kinds of crap I’ll be emailed from websites tomorrow.

I’ll detail them here; here’s a suitably rubbish one for starters:

From a big hotel chain: “Just for James” - between now and 23 August, stay in Budapest and claim special bonus points!
(For the record, I’ve never stayed in Budapest, nor anywhere in Eastern Europe since 1987. The price is cheap, but requires at least two nights, and doesn’t include VAT, which makes this email - gosh - illegal.)

It’ll be interesting to see what I get from some websites I use. A few years ago, Guinness was kind enough to send me (through the post) a coupon for some free beer. Not much has topped that; but let’s wait and see what I get.

(If you ask for user’s dates of birth on your website… what are you using that data for if not to greet your user on their birthday?)




[UPDATE] So far…

Tech Support Guy says “We at Tech Support Guy would like to wish you a very happy birthday today!”
vBulletin.org says “We at vBulletin.org Forum would like to wish you a happy birthday today!”
XFM wishes me a happy birthday, and advises me to pull a sickie tomorrow.

So far, XFM wins for at least having some kind of personal-like message.

(Virgin Radio, and Media UK, both don’t send birthday greetings. Yet.)

6 comments

Nick Piggott said at March 18th, 2007 at 8:17am

Happy Birthday then! Have a good day, and hopefully you’ll get something worth having to compensate for the sea of spam.

Stewart Priest said at March 18th, 2007 at 1:23pm

Happy Birthday, James! I would get you something, but all I can offer is a couple of car stickers from the stations I work at… and possibly a set of drumsticks branded with the station name…

roy martin said at March 18th, 2007 at 9:12pm

Goodness, if you were registered with the mighty JingleMad.com, you’d have been sent a jingle which sings happy birthday to you. But as you are not, you won’t.

Ah.

James Cridland said at March 18th, 2007 at 10:26pm

Thank heavens for that.

roy martin said at March 19th, 2007 at 1:39pm

Something to do in time for next year though?

Off sick - or off the radar? - blog - James Cridland said at May 24th, 2007 at 9:48pm

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