The card came around on a Wednesday. It was a standard card with a cartoon cat on the front, and it said “Happy Birthday, Gwen” in a font that suggested excitement without committing to it. Under the message, in small print, was a line that read “By signing, you agree to the Terms,” and a URL.
I am an attorney, and I read URLs. The URL led to a document of 9,200 words, titled “Terms of Signature (Birthday, Floor 3).” I read it on the Thursday, during a meeting I was not required to attend. I have read it four more times since, and I would like the record to show that the card has been signed by 41 people, and that I was the only one who read the terms before signing, which I did on a Friday, in pencil, out of respect.
Section 2 is the one that matters. It provides that “by signing, the signatory acknowledges that Gwen is a person of the Office and agrees to contribute six dollars to the cake fund, payable on or before the cake.” The cake is not defined. Section 6 refers to “the Cake,” a separate agreement incorporated by reference and not provided. I asked Floor 3 for a copy. A woman named Trish said she would look into it, and then said that she had signed the card, and that it seemed to her that the Cake was already in the agreement, and that I was being difficult about the cake.
The document is well drafted. Section 4, which states that “signatories agree to be remembered for their handwriting,” is a fine piece of work. It is not a promise. It is a warning that someone will be looking at the handwriting. Section 7(b) provides that any signatory who writes only “Congrats” waives the right to a second signature, and I have checked, and two people did exactly that, and both are now bound by 7(b) to a second card.
I want to be fair to the drafters. They anticipated a great deal. Section 9 makes every signature binding in perpetuity, whether made in pen, in marker, or in a looping mark that the signatory no longer recognizes as theirs. Section 11 provides that “Gwen may not read the card until the cake is cut.” Section 13 states that “the card may be amended by whichever signatory has the pen.” The pen, I can report, is currently with Floor 3, and has been since August.
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, has studied the signing habits of workplace cards since 2019. “In a sample of 412 offices, 96.31 percent of birthday cards were signed by people who had never met the birthday person,” Teller said. “Of those, 0.4 percent had read the card before writing in it, and in every case the card was about a different Gwen.” I asked her whether her own office had a card. She said yes, and that she had signed it, and that she was not in a position to comment on Section 2.
I did, in the end, speak with Gwen. She is 52 and has worked on Floor 3 for eleven years. She said she had never read the card, and that she did not know whether she was bound by it, because she had not signed it, and because she had been sent the cake in a box with no note. I asked whether she had eaten the cake. She said she had, and that it was the “Cake,” in the capital-letter sense, and that she was not sure she had agreed to that.
I have tried to withdraw my signature. Section 12 says that signatures may be withdrawn “at any time, by taking the card down from the corkboard.” I took it down. It went back up by lunch, with a new signature on it, in the handwriting of a man from Floor 5, who wrote “Congrats” and underlined it twice, and whom I have since been told is also bound.
The cake was chocolate. I am still bound to the cake. I believe the cake is bound to me.
NOTICE: Nothing in this column binds the reader to a cake. By reading this column, the reader agrees that a cake has been purchased on their behalf, and that the reader has been asked to sign the card.