My Surprise Baby Shower

I was really surprised to have one.

Baby shower seems like a big pregnancy thing in the US. When we started our baby registry at Babies R Us, the lady asked Zack if he needed shower invitation cards and hesitently he said No…Yes…may be… So she gave us 50 free cards which are useless for us. Actually some people even asked me why we set up the registry since no one would be buying us anything from there but we had it for our own record.

We have practically no family in the US, so unlike the norm around us we were not expecting any family member to throw us a shower. We did, however, get a lot of gifts from our family back in Pakistan. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law sent us 7 hand-knit sets, my brother sent me two baby dresses and one bedding set. My mom, who had not touched the needles for last 20+ years, knit three baby sweater sets for our baby and also she sent us 12 baby dresses.

I also recently changed my job from one software system to another within the same parent company and almost all of my friends of 5 years and colleagues were either force-adjusted or spread out in various software business units, so I wasn’t expecting any gifts/shower from the folks at work.

Every now and then people will ask me “So did you have baby shower yet?” Or like “it’s good to have registry as most of the small stuff others will buy for you.” And even though I will brag about the gifts our family sent, they will give me a look of pity.

This friday, life was going as usual. These days I have way too much work. Practically I am working more than 10 hours a day. Since my manager is on vacation, I am also acting on his behalf which makes me practically on call for 24 hours and I have conflicting management meetings and technical meetings all the time.

So like I said life was going on as usual. I had a meeting scheduled with one developer to go over some design and architectural details for some feature at 1:30pm and then I was meeting our product managers for some upcoming demo opportunities at 3:00pm. So I went to the developer’s office at 1:30pm and she seemed a bit out of it. I tried to go over the technical details but she did not seem to be following.

Meanwhile, another senior architect walked in and told me that our CEO had some questions for an upcoming demo and he would appreciate it if I could help them out with some technical information. I was a little upset with the unexpected additional work but I said ok let’s go. We walked to our main conference room. The door was closed. When he opened the door, I can’t describe how much overwhelmed I was. The room was fully decorated and there were 50+ people from at least 10 different software business units including most managers and our VP. Yes, the friends who were all scattered in different orgs, the people I worked with on various projects for the last 5 years and friends who were force-adjusted from this company were all gathered to share the excitement of the most wonderful experience of my life. They had arranged a surprise baby shower for me. There was plenty of food and gifts but what mattered the most was the thought.

I could not speak for may be 5 minutes. I was almost in tears and to embarrass me later, they took a lot of pictures.

All I can say is that I was touched and there is no better feeling than the feeling of sharing joy, happiness and special moments with your friends.