My birthday was last week and I received five electronic birthday cards, all from people I work with. Number of real-life cards received: Zero.

It’s not a big deal to receive birthday salutations via email, but since e-cards are inherently impersonal I think people should at least try to make the e-card seem like it’s personal.

E-card Do’s and Don’ts:

1. If you’re going to send a birthday e-card to an employee on behalf of the entire department, please be courteous enough to remove the birthday person’s name from the generic list of employees on the card.

2. While you’re at it, please also correct the typo in “From your friend’s at [name of organization].”

3. If you’re going to create a birthday card in Microsoft Publisher, instead of emailing the Publisher document to the birthday person and letting her open it in Publisher (assuming she has the program installed) and scroll through the card’s four pages in draft format, why not just print it out and give it to her the old-fashioned way?

Besides being baffled by the sense of e-cards, I had a good birthday. My parents came into town and we ate very good ice cream cake from Cold Stone (courtesy of my sister). Another year down!