“Mrs. DeLay provides big-picture, long-term strategic guidance and helps with personnel decisions.”
–Tom DeLay’s political action committee
the committee’s statement was responding to a report that the House majority leader’s wife and daughter have received more than $500,000 since 2001 from it and from DeLay’s campaign committee
Memorandum April 20, 2005
Re: My wife getting on the payroll
To: Boss
From: Mark Bazer
For the past four years, I have worked diligently for you, always with the company’s best interests and profit margins my primary concerns. I believe I have been a model employee, and I have my performance reviews–that you had me write up prior to you initialing them–to show for it.
However, while I have been given a fair salary, I find it regrettable that you’ve failed to compensate my wife–somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-million dollars.
Without in any way wishing to detract from my own significant accomplishments, I feel it’s important I make you aware of how my job performance, and thus the company’s success, has benefited from my wife’s big-picture, long-term strategic guidance and help with personnel decisions.
How has her big-picture, long-term strategic guidance and help with personnel decisions helped us? Well, specifically, she has offered guidance on personnel strategy with an eye to the long-term big picture, strategized vis-a-vis the long-term-personnel big picture, guided long-term personnel on big-picture strategy, and a whole lot more.
In fact, it was precisely my wife’s big-picture, long-term strategic guidance that brought me to the company in the first place, when she advised: “Mark, you can’t act. You’re such a bad actor that you’re even a lousy waiter. Sorry, someone had to say it, other than, of course, the countless casting directors at your auditions. So get a real job, or I’m outta here.”
Since my hiring, my wife has had a major impact on matters pertaining to our company. True, she’s been in our office only twice (on March 14, 2002, to print her resume and on Nov. 9, 2003, to use our color copier for invitations to a baby shower she was throwing). But she has always served as ready counsel not only on long-term concerns (the scheduling of my sick days) but on daily ones as well (pants selection).
Let there be no doubt: Without her invaluable input, I would have violated the “no Lycra” policy several times.
Our company’s “big picture,” it’s safe to say, is where my wife has focused most of her energies. Case in point: She is the one who suggested, during her Nov. 9, 2003, visit to the office, that we clean out the office refrigerator. We then put the leftover food we found in new takeout containers and were able to use it to compensate the data-entry temps for two months.
My wife, I concede, has had less of an effect on personnel decisions, though her strong opinions of you and some of my colleagues shouldn’t be discounted. I recall her being apprehensive about our hiring Frederika Gustavsson as an office assistant, perhaps because we had recently attended “The Producers.”
Of course, the company still hired Frederika, but in hindsight I think we can agree that was an error in judgment. Frederika’s nearly successful campaign to institute three months of vacation for employees because “that’s what we have in my village of Svanberga” would’ve spelled disaster for our bottom line. Also, recall, you got a divorce.
I don’t believe what I am asking for is unreasonable. If we’ve got 23 senior vice presidents on the payroll, surely we have room for one spouse. So, in summation, paying my wife for her contributions is not only the right thing to do–it’s the American thing to do. Heck, it’s as American as baseball, apple pie and the majority leader of the House of Representatives.
———-
More Top Picks Icicle Light