The problem with baby showers.

[learnsslowly]

We’ve had quite a few of these where I work this year. Five, I think. I have about 60 colleagues.

Comments

[heliopausa]

What a lovely woman your mother was! :) And I think it's wonderful to show welcoming to new babies, but emphatically not wonderful to be dragooned into a false show of welcome as part of an employer's jolly-up-the-workplace scheme. The reminder emails sound horribly heavy-handed - if you knew them well enough to give a present, you wouldn't need reminding; if the workplace thinks people need reminding then it is conceding that the whole business is artificial - and it puts a burden on the parent-to-be as well as on the supposed (wrongly supposed!) classificatory aunts and uncles, since I imagine the parent needs to trek around the workplace thanking everyone individually, and remembering which, of the people whose names they don't even know, gave what(I don't know what a three-tailed whip means, but I'm assuming a sense of being hounded inescapably

[learnsslowly]

Well for all I know, other colleagues have also withdrawn from it. The thanks have also been done by round-robin email, and I also received a little printed thank-you card in my pigeon-hole. Obviously the parent to be had put one in every pigeon hole for fear of missing out someone who had given something!
A three line whip is a political reference - a message from the party whip (underlined three times)to an MP of their own party that they really must turn up for a particular vote and vote in accordance with the party line. I wrote it and then wondered if it was specific only to the House of Commons.