Can you cut the office cake if the birthday boy or girl isn’t there?

My workplace has a birthday-cake roster and this week I was the designated cake-provider. I purchased a cake en route to work, only to find the birthday colleague was off sick. Not knowing when he might be back, I popped it in the fridge. My colleagues got the cake out, sang happy birthday to no one, and tucked in. Should they have waited?
K.D., Orange, NSW

Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch

Cake ownership seems to be the big question here. You probably think you own the cake because you bought it with your money, brought it to work and popped it in the workplace fridge beside the opened Tuna Tempters cans and spoilt milk so it soaked up those scrumptious, workplace-fridge flavours. But your colleagues might think they collectively own the cake because everyone at work has to buy one at some point in the year, including the coeliac guy in Customer Service who brings in a delicious, potato-starch cake iced with psyllium husks. And your absent colleague might think he owns the cake because it’s his birthday and the cake is his gift, along with a generic, oversized birthday card filled with dozens of scrawled, half-arsed “Happy birthday!” and “Best wishes” messages alongside one bold, thrilling, “Hope you have a rippa!!!”

My feeling is, nobody owns the cake: it exists in a state of cake dormancy until it’s been formally handed over to the birthday colleague. Which means that without him, there should be no cake-eating, song-singing or party-celebrating with three balloons, a box of Pizza Shapes and mugs of milky, tuna-infused tea. Your colleagues should have waited until the sick colleague was back at work, and if he was still sick after a week – or he died – then everyone could eat the cake before it went rancid. But no need to sing Happy Birthday. And definitely ditch the card.

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