Surprise!

What do you think of when you hear "Surprise!"?  Is it a good surprise, like a party or a cake or flowers or a friend on your doorstep?  Or is it a bad surprise, like your car breaking down or a phone call with bad news in the middle of the night?

 

For me it's somewhere in the middle.  I imagine a work surprise.  My work is very surprising these days, and almost never in good ways.  Like today, we got a surprise deadline.  Those are always the best.  Unreasonable deadlines are pretty nasty.  But a surprise deadline is an unreasonable deadline with even less notice.  Today at 1:00 in the afternoon, we found out that we had a deadline for 6 p.m.  I'm frantically trying to marshal resources and keep my project manager from having an actual, factual heart attack.  That's not actually a joke--he showed up in the project room breathing heavily and looking far more red than usual, and then he started to sweat profusely and became extremely pale.

 

It's all very surprising.