Jonna started a new job a few months ago as a QA Analyst. She has been working tons of overtime over the past few months due to a new site launch. When we got back from the Bristol Renaissance Fair yesterday evening, we found these on the door step. My first reaction was “I wonder who is sending Jonna flowers?” They were actually for me, from her company – thanking me for my patience during the time she put in and the sacrifices I made for their launch.

I made fun of it at first – mainly because if anyone has sacrificed anything through our marriage, its Jonna. For most of our marriage I’ve been the one working all of the time and she hasn’t really gotten anything out of it. When she took the job, it was kind of just an expectation that there would be overtime on my part, coming from almost 20 years in IT (the last 7 in internet based applications with that 99.9% uptime rule). I also spend a lot of non-work time reading to keep up to speed on new developments and learning different languages just to keep current. To be honest, I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary for the role she was in.

I guess this just goes to show you that some companies actually do think about the ramifications that overtime has on employees families. After my initial time making fun of the fact that I actually got flowers, I started thinking about what a cool thing it is for a company to acknowledge an employees spouse in this way.

See? You learn something new every day!