‘Why did they do me like that?’: Woman sees her birth certificate after 15 years and find an insane typo
How did her parents not see it?
Most of us only look at our birth certificate when we’re applying for a passport or proving we actually exist to a government agency. But one Australian woman recently decided to take a trip down memory lane. Only, she found out that according to official state records, she was born a literal giant.
TikTok creator Ruby (@motionthiccness) shared a video that has quickly become a classic for anyone who appreciates the sheer incompetence of administrative errors. Ruby had not glanced at the document for 15 years. But when she finally did, she realized the hospital staff had recorded her birth weight as something statistically impossible. It was a gigantic error, if you may.
The 2,200 kilogram baby
In the video, Ruby starts by showing her brother’s birth certificate, which lists a perfectly normal weight of 3.65 kilograms. But when she switches the camera to her own document, the numbers are staggered. Instead of a few kilos, the official record states Ruby weighed 2,200 kilograms at birth.
To put that into perspective, that’s about 4,850 pounds. For context, that is the weight of a fully grown rhinoceros or a mid-sized SUV. “Would anyone like to guess what is mine?” Ruby asked her followers, before highlighting the typo that suggests her mother performed a miracle that should be studied by every scientist on the planet.
How did the hospital mess up a birth certificate like that?
The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Ruby, who captioned the video with, “Get Jenny Craig on the line. I’m finally spilling my secret.” It’s clearly a clerical error. There must be a decimal point that went on a permanent vacation. But it’s a reminder of how little attention is paid to the documents that define our legal lives.
How does a professional at a hospital type “2200” into a weight field for a newborn and not immediately think, “Wait, that’s literally the size of a small whale”? It’s an indication of the autopilot mode many bureaucratic offices operate in. For 15 years, Ruby has legally been a two-ton infant, and nobody in the Australian government thought to double-check if a human being had actually given birth to a vehicle.
The internet played along
The comments section understood their assignment quite hilariously. It was filled with people wondering how her mother survived the ordeal of birthing a superhuman giant. “Someone call Guinness, I think you win!” one wrote. One also raised a valid question: “What was it supposed to be? Because 22kg is still massive for an infant, 2.2 is like severely premature small.”
To the fair question, one nurse responded, “As a mom/baby nurse, we’d weigh the babies before they go home. And if we forgot the decimal, an alert would pop up ‘patient has 1000% weight increase’ like dang. Others shared their own administrative horror stories.
“On mine, on the hand-written copy had the right year, but could see they’d initially written 1971 instead of 1991. I’m glad they caught it, who knows what problems I may have had in life if they hadn’t.”
Sadly, Ruby would have to pay to get her birth certificate fixed
These are the the kind of errors that are funny until you realize you have to pay a fee and wait six weeks to tell the government you don’t actually weigh as much as a Ford F-150. On top of it, she might never know how much did she really weigh at the time. Her viral discovery is a hilarious lesson in why you should always read the fine print, even on the day you’re born.
When the experience of entering the world involves being recorded as a mythological creature, you have to wonder what other “facts” in our official records are just the result of a tired clerk hitting the ‘0’ key too many times. But until she gets that decimal point fixed, she’s officially the heaviest baby in human history.
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