Welcome back to the most specific inside joke of the CHH multiverse—the fact that my husband “put me on a PIP” (ie: performance improvement plan) about a year ago.
Don’t worry, this was not literal (there was never any threat of anything happening should I “fail” the PIP) and was a joke we both cooked up based on some existing tropes in this Substack.
So, to fill in the newcomers: Before I was a writer, I had a long history of getting fired from tech jobs, not because I did anything atrocious but rather because despite my best efforts I just wasn’t very good at my jobs. Also, perhaps just due to bad luck, I was repeatedly hired at companies that were on the verge of failure themselves, and one of the only established companies which hired me did so for a role that didn’t contain any work, despite my attempts to manifest useful work for myself.
But anyway, given that my husband was present for all of these failures, my constantly being in hot water with my boss eventually became a joke between us. (Okay, it wasn’t so funny when it was happening, but it became funny once I realized I might not have to circle this drain forever.) My husband is also a tech executive (and not one who struggles to keep a job) who basically has the role of the person who would have been firing me, So, throughout my time in tech I repeatedly asked him for advice by prefacing my issue with, “Would you fire someone if…?”
I tried to make this sexy one time. When I was a product manager, I asked my husband, “Imagine I reported to you and I sent you a Jira ticket that was formatted just…terribly. What would you do to me?” He responded, “I don’t look at the Jira tickets.” What do they say again about how women don’t make the first move?
Then, the other side of things: my husband is such a neat freak that I suspect he is obfuscating German ancestry and I am, well, kind of a slob. For anyone who thinks the concept of my husband pretending to be my boss is misogynistic, I am happy to inform you that by me taking on the role of lazy husband and my husband taking on the role of the neurotic wife carrying the mental load, we are actually subverting heteronormativity, the patriarchy, and frankly, the entire concept of gender. Consider yourself officially out-woked.
Anyway, the combination of my work history and the fact that I am one of the messiest people in the world led us to start co-writing a series where my husband evaluated my “performance” around the house the way he might evaluate an employee. Don’t worry, no Substack writers were harmed in the making of this article.
Without further ado, a PIP followup by the man who writes PIPs for a living…
Performance Improvement Plan Review for CartoonsHateHer
