It happens once in four years and, no, we aren’t talking about the Fifa World Cup.

But being part of a minuscule minority of people born on February 29 — the odds are 1 in 1461 — generates
as much passion as the game that has 22 players eyeing a single ball.

The cool factor

Leapers, or those born on leap day, have a certain cool factor attached to them.

Like being able to stand in the middle of a crowded room and watch people’s jaws drop when they say, “I’m 8”,
when they are actually 32. Or better still: “I was born in 1960, though I’m going to be 12 this year.”

But being able to stand out in a crowd brings with it its share of disadvantages. One of them is to be subjected
to the dreaded “invalid birthdate” bug.

Leapers know what it’s like to try and enter their birthdate on a website registration screen and they may even
have got used to it but how do you soften the blow for a little leapling?

“How do you explain to a five-year-old, that they won’t receive a birthday card from Geoffrey, over at the mall toy
store, this year because the toy store’s computer has no way to recognise their birthday,” asks Raenell Dawn,
co-founder of the Honour Society of Leap Year Day Babies, the largest internet birthday club.

That’s precisely why the Honour Society has released free software that web designers can use to avoid the
bug. The software is posted on the organisation’s website at http://leapyearday.com/hr/freecode.html

No more being ignored

The software determines if any year is a leap year and can be used for birthdate verification.

It can also be used in automated birthdate response systems that usually ignore people born on February 29,
says a press release.

Until recently, even sites such as YouTube and Borders Books rejected leapers.

Peter Brouwer, a spokesperson for the Honour Society, says he’s not surprised by the invalid birthdate bug.
“Many Americans don’t understand leap year — so why should the internet?” Brouwer doesn’t want to see a
repeat of the leap year bug, which has taken over 20 years to correct.

“In that bug, 1900 was counted as a leap year, even though it was not a leap year,” Brouwer says.

With that bug out of the way, leapers have another reason why their birthday this year should be all the more
special.

Leap tales

• It is believed that the tradition of women proposing to men on February 29 started in 5th-century Ireland
  when St Bridget complained to St Patrick about women having to wait long for a man to propose.
• According to legend, St Patrick said yearning females could propose on this one day in February during the
  leap year. According to a 1288 law issued by Queen Margaret of Scotland (then aged five and living in
  Norway), a man was made to pay a fine if he refused to accept a proposal. Compensation ranged from a
  kiss to presenting a silk gown. Men felt that the law put them at too great a risk and so the tradition was
  tightened to restrict female proposals to the modern leap day, 29 February, or to the medieval leap day,
  February 24. 
• In Greece, it is believed that getting married in a leap year brings bad luck to the couple. No wonder that
  around the middle of the past century, couples avoided setting a marriage date in a leap year.
• The Guinness Book of World Records has documented the rare case of Norway’s Henriksen siblings, who
  amazingly were born on three consecutive Leap Days in the 1960s.