Ma’am, take a seat. Slug of private-detective desk whiskey? Suit yourself. I thought you might need fortification for what I have to tell you. See, I’ve been tailing your husband all week to ascertain where he goes between the hours of nine and five-ish. And after doing a bunch of stakeout things—drinking coffee, chain smoking, crushing stopwatches under the wheels of his car, et cetera—I’m afraid I’ve concluded that your husband isn’t the man you think he is. You aren’t the only woman in his life. That’s right—he has a “work wife.”
Don’t believe me? Here, let me toss a coupla photographs onto your lap. That’s the two of them, in the break room, sharing an inside joke about avocados. It made her chuckle once in 2021 and he’s been rehashing it once or twice a day ever since.
That’s a great question, ma’am. Do I tell my male clients with female spouses that their wives have “work husbands”? No, in my experience, those are generally just called “friends.” It’s only when a guy has a banter-y little back-and-forth with a female co-worker that he feels compelled to say something to the effect of “you’re my wife here now.”
Should you feel threatened? I’d say you should feel as threatened as any non-work wife could. I tapped your husband’s phone to see how much Words with Friends they’re playing, and, not to twist the knife or anything, they’re on a nineteen-day streak. Plus, he just spent his whole lunch hour getting her advice on what to buy you for your birthday, then showed her pictures of you and the kids and talked about how he wishes he could work from home so he could spend more time with all of you. Pretty sleazy stuff.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, honey. Unfortunately, as tends to happen with private-detective work, my quotidian marital investigation has inadvertently led me to uncover a larger conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Your husband told you he’s a “product manager,” right? Wrong. Your husband’s job job . . . is scheduling meetings.
And he’s not the only one. That whole company is basically just a cabal of meeting-schedulers. All-hands, follow-ups, one-on-ones—meetings that could’ve been e-mails, but never are. And all of them end fifteen minutes early with the participants “getting some time back” in their day. But do the Google Calendar blocks get adjusted? They never do. This broken system is rank with corruption!
Then they all meet up in a sinister internal Slack channel called “the biz rizzers,” where they probably laugh about making 150K a year scheduling touch-bases, before they go home to spend their ill-gotten gains in a shadowy gambling den called FanDuel. God, I picked the wrong day to quit smoking.
But don’t you worry, ma’am. Once I confirm that the culprits of this larger conspiracy won’t face meaningful consequences for their actions, and deliver an existential monologue into my desk whiskey about how the little guy is just a cog in the machine, I’ll circle back to the work-wife case as a Pyrrhic victory, for thematic closure. It’s a tough, narratively convoluted way to make a living, but someone in this rotten town’s gotta do it. Now that’ll be twelve-hundred dollars for expenses—I ate nothing but Sweetgreen during the stakeout. ♦
