The Devil You Know

My wife and I (Wait a minute, did I just start a post with the words "My wife" after including "The Devil" in the title. Yes, yes I did.) have practically the same job. Sure her work clothes are much smaller than mine and I have covered parking at my office, but other than that our experiences from day to day are pretty similar. Not only do we work both work in the same function, IT (that's "information technology" for those of you who probably have no business reading a blog on the "world wide web"), but we both work in the same discipline, BI (that's "business intelligence" for those of you who probably also work in IT and still have no idea what it is that we do). And, even though we work for different companies, we both work primarily on software sold by the same vendor.

Oftentimes, we even have the same leftovers for lunch. Freaky deaky, I know.

Every time I share this with someone, they immediately fall into one of two camps: that would be unfathomably awesome, or that would suck things that are really sucky. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Unfathomably awesome

• I can say things like "I'm on call" and  "Sorry, my meeting ran long" and she immediately understands that she'll need to pick up all of the kids and take care of them until I show up 3 hours later smelling like bourbon.
• She makes fat bank. More than me actually. I'm progressive like that.
• When we need to talk about work, we save a heck of a lot of time providing context with one another. To put it another way, we both really, really get Dilbert cartoons.
• She forgives me my boondoggles. I've been doing a lot more traveling lately, and she's awesome at dealing with it. In fact, the house and kids are much calmer and more collected when I come back. Which makes me think I should leave a lot more often.
• We can literally call each other in the middle of the day, ask a deeply technical question, get a deeply technical answer that we trust, and end the convo with an "I love you". Which is nice.

Suckety suck suck suck

• She can say things to me like "I'm on call" and  "Sorry, my meeting ran long" and I immediately understand that I'll  need to pick up all of the kids and take care of them until she shows up 3 hours later smelling like tequila.
• I recently realized that I don't ever really talk about my job at home. I think its because by the time she's unloaded her day, I've already been talking about work for an hour, and I don't really want any more office talk.
• She also occasionally has big projects happen, which effectively leaves me as an ineffective single parent. She's actually in Miami right now wrapping up a project that left me a total bad a$$. PLEASE DON'T COME ROB MY HOUSE NOW THAT YOU KNOW THE HEAD BREADWINNER IS OUT OF TOWN!

Somewhere in the middle
Looking back, this really isn't much of a competition. Having a ton of common ground with my wife is hugely important to me and more than makes up for not flapping my gums about work and being forced to spend some extra time with my kids.