Working in the same office as your spouse can be pretty great at times. Commute together, go out to lunch together, even walks around the company lake together. (On one such walk our couple, Julie and Jim, were accused of cheating on each other by a co-worker who knew they were both married, but didn't realize that it was to each other. It was all sorted out to the extreme embarrassment of the accuser who got called out publicly by another coworker.) Of course, there can be downsides too. When you spend all day together at work there's not much to talk about over dinner. Also, sometimes your coworkers treat you as a unit instead of as autonomous individuals and sometimes seem to think that giving a message to one of you counts as communicating with both of you.
But then there are people like Barry. It's bad enough that Barry was a yes-man who was incapable of advance planning or standing up to his boss, which often meant that that both Julie and Jim were stuck working late, or going home early and working many more hours once the kids were in bed. The problem is that Barry had a wife who he seemingly took for granted, who was a stay-at-home Mom and apparently handled all of the parenting duties during the week, so he seemed to forget that some people both worked in an office and had parental duties.
One night with a big deadline approaching, Barry walked up between the desks of Jim and Julie (who sat across the small aisle from each other) and asked Julie, "Hey, can you please work late tonight? We need to get this big release out on your project." After she begrudgingly agreed (she had seen this coming and had driven to work separately in anticipation of a late night), Barry turned around and looked at Jim and said "hey, can you please work late tonight?" Jim said, "Sorry I can't tonight, I have to go home and take care of the kids".
Barry, with a flat affect and absolutely no sense of irony looked Jim straight in the eyes and said "Can't your wife do that for you so you can work late?"
Rumor has it that Jim and Julie are still recovering from their sprained eyeballs and bruised foreheads after this encounter.
