12 years ago the Heartbleed vulnerability was disclosed and I started my birthday with an emergency meeting of engineering staff. I had just started leading the tech writing team at Puppet. While Puppet itself was fine, we knew that customers were probably running it on platforms that weren’t fine, and everyone agreed that we needed to help our users, so we did it with documentation about how to patch it.

I couldn’t contribute anything to the docs themselves: We had two great writers on that, so I just got on with my day. The docs got written, and we staged them for publication, but couldn’t publish until nine or ten that evening. So after a day of feeling a little useless for not being able to help with the docs, I realized there was somewhere I could help: I could send the team home and wait around until we got the word it was okay to release our docs and the accompanying blog post.

So I called Al and told her I’d be late, got dinner downtown, then lurked around the office in the Pearl District waiting for the word so I could pop open a shell and run the deployment.

Someone on the marketing team who was waiting around to ship the blog post stopped by and asked, “isn’t it your birthday?” Yeah, I said, but we had these docs to push and the team had done all the hard work, so I figured I’d wrap it up so they could get on with their evenings.

“That sucks,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know how many users we have but I know it’s a lot. And these docs are going to help them a lot. So it’s hard to complain: A birthday spent helping all those people seems like a good birthday present.”

“Fair enough,” she said, and we sat in companionable silence until we could click our respective “post” or “deploy” buttons and head home.

I got home pretty late that night. Al had gone to sleep, and there was a cupcake on the counter with a candle sticking out of it, and that was it for the birthday where I noted that I could officially round my age up to 50.

Some birthdays I work, some birthdays I don’t. I spent my 25th birthday in Basic Training. My 26th I was in a retransmission station in Korea. My 9th birthday didn’t officially happen because it was suspended over an infraction that caused my mother to believe I should spend the day contemplating what it would be like to not be alive to have birthdays. There may have still been a cake, but the three months leading up to it were spent contemplating the void, which is probably where posts like the one I wrote three days before Heartbleed Day come from.

This birthday I worked, and it was a pretty good day: I had my weekly 1:1 with my favorite work person, I had a quiet conversation with someone on my team where we reaffirmed the best parts of our connection, and the last meeting of the day was spent with a colleague in Australia, figuring out how to help her do a thing she’s trying to do. Nothing that moves any cosmic needle or dents the universe. Just another day.

Today I re-read that birthday post I wrote three days before Heartbleed Day, as I do every year, always wondering if the math is going to come out different for me this time, or if the answer will change, and it has not:

Mostly I think we’re born in a house that’s on fire, and there’ll be a moment between flame and ash.

We’ll need to have been kind.