Hi all You faithful readers of my daily posts and followers of my blog. Today I take my right, to be fully selfish and to write this post entirely for my wife, my familly and all my worldwide, especially my Mexican, friends – and for me. And I also use this opportunity to thank all those of my thousands of friends and followers in the social media and here in my blog for Your highly appreciated wonderful birthday greetings. Until last year I still tried, to answer and thank personally all people, who congratulated me for getting older. But this does definitely not work any longer, because of the huge quantity of wonderful messages and greetings which I receive now. Therefore I use this post for a collective “Thank You very much” to all of You.
To celebrate my own birthdays has always been a quite strange subject for me. To be true, there were so far only 3 birthdays in my life, which I was willfully celebrating. The first of these was my sixteenth birthday. But this was just because at that time in Germany from the age of sixteen on I was oficially allowed to smoke cigarettes – which I quit with twentyeight years forever, thank God. The really most important of all my birthdays was my eighteenth. This was by far the most important and longingly awaited for one and in the first week after having reached this age as “new adult” I started my car drivers licence course, for which You needed at least the age of eighten years as a German. The third somehow important birthday for me was my fifteeth birthday. I felt enormously proud to have reached this impressive age successfully and in strong health conditions and I enjoyed a really nice birthday weekend party over two and a half days and nights in a youth hostel at a romantic castle in the middle of the forests in the western German area, where I had been born so endlessly long before together with my mother, sister, wife, five children from my two marriages and plenty of friends from the different periods of my life.
All other birthdays – to be frank and open to You – were not really important for me. I enjoy greatly great days. And if such a great day falls together with one of my birthdays, I can live easily with it. But I had always difficulties, to feel great on day just because it was my birthday. My wife and children did never really understand and accept this. But such small differences in opinion do not really hurt anybody.
But one of all my other numerous birthdays was really outstanding and I must therefore mention it here. At that time during 2007 I was working as Managing Director at the brandnew big assembly plant for interior parts for cars which I had installed and rampd up together with my great team of colaborators since 2006 on the greenfield in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico for BOS, a german autoparts supplier and global market leader in its segment.
I swear I did not have the least clue, how my wife and my CFO and friend Claus Welker would set me up on my birthday, which in this particular year happened to be on a saturday. On the evening before, Claus rang me on my mobile fone and asked me, to meet him at my office in our factory on that saturday morning because of a – as he indicated – extremely important subject related to a serious financial problem at our company which he had just discovered and could not mention on the fone. No way out for me – I immediately confirmed, that I would meet with him in our industrial park at 8am.
The other morning I drove to our plant for meeting with Claus at 8am, but I became quite furious, because Claus called me at 8:30am and let me know, that he had encountered a small problem and could not come for meeting with me before 9:30am. I did not really find this nice, but as I had no other choice, I held out at my office and did some work until Claus finally arrived at my office at 10:00 am.
What drove me crazy, was that he did not really have any serious explanation for our emergency meeting. To be true, he was just fiddeling around and counted some minor things, which had nothing to do with the “big financial problem” which he originally intended to tell me. At about 11:00am I had enough of this children`s play, told him he should never again invent such stupid meetings for me and went home.
I really did not even think, that this was all intentionally constructed for keeping me away from our house for a couple of hours and when I arrived at our house I still did not have the least suspicion. I parked my car, went into the house but there was nobody of my familly. And the curtains of all windows and the garden terrace door were all closed. What crazy shit was that? I called loudly my wife and our sons, but nobody answered. When I pushed the curtain of the veranda door to the garden open and stepped out, I almost died from heart attack.
Where normally our smaller son played on the green, now there was a big open tent like construction full with plastic tables and chairs, a hell of party decoration and about 60 friends and colleagues and their famillies. And in front of all these surprise party guests my wife, our sons and Claus Welker were standing for receiving me there upon my complete surprise. Oh man, what a crazy fool I had been !!!!!
We had a wonderful birthday party through the rest of the day and the whole night. Mexicans know how to make parties. In the afternoon the obligatory Mariachi band came marching in and they stayed until the last drop of my nice tequila collection had been drunk. Normally You hire the Mariachis for one, two or three hours, but if the party is good and Your guests are animated, they will pay the Mariachis for prolongation hours and the Mariachis, if they do not have another appointment for playing at somebody elses house, stay as long as You can pay them and Your tequila lasts.
For all my party guests from our wonderful birthday party on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at our house in Villas, Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, I choose this wonderful Mexican song “Cómo te voy a olvidar ” played by the famous Mexican cumbia music group Los Àngeles Azules.
Thanks for Your highly appreciated interested (?) company during my (first) birthday post in this blog today. Take care ! I`ll have a tequila (or two ) tonight !
