Birthdays it remembers, ages it cannot know

A Birthday on somebody’s profile is a month and a day, and on the morning it comes round the bot posts to whatever channel an HR Head named for celebrations — a fresh message each time, with a GIF. It goes out in the Workspace’s own local time, never before nine in the morning, and two people who share a date share one post rather than competing with each other. A wish lands inside its own day or not at all, because a belated one is worse than silence. February 29 is celebrated on the 28th in ordinary years, and naming no channel simply turns the public wish off.

Nobody has to spot the date coming. Once a Birthday falls inside the next seven days, the bot sends one message ahead of it to the Workspace’s HR Heads and to that person’s own Lead — not to every Lead, and never to the person themselves. Those are batched — one message covering everyone it concerns, rather than one per person — and no Birthday is announced to the same people twice in a year. A Birthday learned three days out is announced then rather than never; one learned on the day itself is not announced at all, because the wish is minutes away.

Whether you are celebrated at all is your own standing answer. The bot asks once, in the same conversation where it learns the date, and declining is a first-class answer rather than a gap it will chase — tell it otherwise later and it changes from there on. Withhold it and you leave the feature entirely: no wish, and no word about you to anyone in advance. The wish itself is composed from names and mentions and nothing else, so something told to the bot in private cannot surface in a public channel.

The year is the part worth reading twice. A Birthday is held as a month and a day, and every path that writes one strips the year first — the Slack profile field it can be seeded from, the conversation it is usually given in, an HR Head’s later correction. Values that pre-date the feature were truncated once and cannot be recovered. Nothing here can answer how old somebody is, because the figure that would answer it is not held anywhere. All of it is part of the assistant already in your Workspace, on every plan including the free one: no second bot to install, and no second subscription.