Gelle, one of my best friends in P&G, turned a year older today. Last year we had cooked up a surprise for her — I planned a videoke session and secretly invited her boyfriend Joey to join us.
Unfortunately, while discussing it over lunch, Liza slipped and said, “Anubah, eh akala ko nga surp-” and gave the whole thing away.
In the end we were not able to push through with the plan because Gelle got laryngitis and other people got busy with work and stuff.
This year, we had run out of ideas and came up with a very weird, very funny and perhaps pointless gimmick for her — we staged a fight and pretended to be at war with each other on her birthday.
Gelle has the image of being the kindest one in the group and we knew she would be the most affected. So we had a conference that had Drew and Yen leaving frostily, leaving me and Liza to lunch with Gelle.
I have to hand it to Liza for being the best actress. She had the whole “You’re being very childish!” thing down pat, while I could only beg to stop talking about the topic so that I would not burst out laughing.
Still… Gelle bought the story hook, line and sinker.
At the end of the day, I fetched her from her workstation under the pretense that I was treating her to Starbucks so that she could earn two more stickers to bring her closer to her coveted planner.
In reality, the rest of the gang was waiting for us at the shop and we were buying the last 6 coffees that would get her her planner at last.
The moment she saw Yen and Drew, she knew what had happened. We all laughed hard as we shared the “making” of the staged fight. Gelle kept saying, “hindi parin ako makapagmove on.” (I still can’t move on)
She was very happy that we were all still friends and that she got her planner…and to cap it all off, the 6th coffee (tea latte, actually) turned out to be for her boyfriend Joey who also showed up.
I’m glad we were able to pull off this year’s surp… I think.