Last month, The Wife and I had a nice dinner out at a Latin restaurant. The Wife got there before I did, and I met her at the bar while we waited for a table. Within 3 seconds of my arrival, the PA system played a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung English and Spanish.

Back story: I’m weird about foreign languages. I treat them like a strange amalgam of a puzzle to be solved and a joke in search of a punchline. Why do I react this way? No idea. I know it’s dumb–just throwin’ it out there.

So this song comes on, and I think it’s hilarious. At any second, it sounds like it’s gonna break out and go on an extended 9 minute Cuban jazz jam. The boys are just gonna lay out. Five minute trombone solo, timbale cadenzas, the works. (Wanna hear it? Click here.)

The Wife sighs. “I’ve heard this song four times already.” Four times? Really. How long has she been here? “About fifteen minutes.”

That didn’t sound possible to me. Then the evening progressed, and I became a believer. Because we heard this song five more times before our table was ready, which only took 20-25 minutes or so.

And over the course of our meal–which could not have lasted more than an hour–I heard this song at least 20 times. Over that time, the song went from being hilarious to grating to annoying to hilarious again–five or six times.

The dining room was big, but it wasn’t that big. It held a hundred people, more or less. Let’s be generous and say they packed 150 people in this room. And let’s also assume that not everybody had their birthday that exact evening. Let’s give a window of a week.

Even with all of these caveats added onto my experience, there is simply no way that I was in the presence of that many people celebrating their birthday. Statistically, it’s impossible.

And no, I don’t know what the statistical probability of such an event is. But even in a room full of people, what are the odds that 10 to 20 percent of them were born within the week?

The first person to figure this out wins absolutely nothing.