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.)
I expect your unobtrusive withdrawal from the shower treadmill has been welcomed with huge relief by other colleagues who were feeling harassed, but didn't have the clarity of thought or courage to make the same move. So well done, you! :)

[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Well for all I know, other colleagues have also withdrawn from it.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.