Last Friday, we planned an advance birthday surprise for our teammate Guohao. It was supposed to be a fairly simple one – buy cupcakes, decorate it with a candle and a dog (an inside joke), and show up at this desk with those.
But our team always like to complicate things, so at the 11th hour, we decided to add a twist – a treasure hunt that starts off with this note:
The plan was for someone to invite him to the pantry for chips and beer, then for us to hide while he was gone. Once he got back, somebody else would hand him this note which would lead to the next few notes:
The notes were designed to lead him around the office and give us sufficient time to set up the cupcakes at our hiding spot – Geneva training room.
Simple enough, right?
Okay, maybe not.
But we hit our first major snag when we couldn’t get him out of his desk to begin with. Why must he be so hardworking on a Friday?!? 😒
So we panicked when we realized we didn’t have a plan B. I frantically IM’ed random people for help and when no one replied because they were all busy, I ran out into the floor and finally managed to flag down Chandra on his way to his office. Could he please please please help us out by calling GH and pretending to need his help for something? He agreed. Whoop! 👍
You need to be thick-faced to be in my team, I realize.
After we finally kicked off the project, we ran downstairs, got ready, and waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Dammit. Where was GH??
Then the calling and texting brigade began as we tried to reach out to our various contacts to try to figure out where he was.
We couldn’t. So we gave up and sent him this picture:
Mission failed! Kidnappees dead! ☠️
But eventually, there was a knock on the door.
He made it after all – but he had the wrong ransom and he was late, so we were still dead. ☠️
Turns out he couldn’t find the last note because Yan Ming had hidden it under the receptionist chair. Guohao had just tried to open the training door because he thought he had heard our voices in there earlier 😅
It was still a fun surprise, though we learned something from it – don’t complicate surprises!
I’m also grateful to the guys from the other departments who helped – Gabriel, Mildred, Cheng Soon, and Chandra. Couldn’t have pulled the whole thing off without them!
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