my boss's wife is rude and insulting, and we're forced to deal with her (2024)

A reader writes:

I work for a small business with a home office on contract. There is no HR department or anything like that, it’s just the owner, me, and another worker. The owner’s wife (who has a full-time job so we never see her) manages the finances; I’ll call her Jane.

My colleague and I keep receiving emails from Jane with no greeting/salutation and an overly aggressive tone, and every time we send our invoices to get paid for the previous period’s work, they’re met with sarcastic comments and payment is consistently late.

Most of her emails contain general complaints and stress about money. To be clear, we have zero access to the accounts and we haven’t spent any money, but we will bring up items that have run low, are requested by customers, or need to be replenished to our boss. Boss spends money without discussing it with her. We think perhaps she is taking this out on us. We keep replying to emails saying “please discuss with Boss directly,” but they keep on coming.

For example, after I sent my September invoice to her (and cc’d Boss) as usual for the previous month’s work and said, “Hi Jane, please find attached invoice xyz for September. Kind regards, me.” (The invoice details each day I worked and what was done, rate and taxes, etc.) She wrote back: “What is this for exactly???” I wrote back (as always, cc’ing my boss): “It’s for my work during September. Any issues or concerns, please contact me, happy to clarify.” Her response: “We DO NOT have money growing on trees here. Explain to me why I should shell out money?”

After some back and forth of polite explaining that we have a contract and it is services in exchange for money, Boss asked her to pay it ASAP, and she then wrote back to me: “We have a LOT of bills. Just yesterday you asked me to pay for ink for the printer which I can’t do because my son is going to soccer camp and I have expenses happening there. And now you send me this and <colleague’s name> also sent me a bill. We are going overseas in December but thanks to you it looks like we’ll have to cancel because we can’t afford it. You are increasing our spendage, we want to be decreasing it.”

To clarify, I am working once a week for agreed upon hours and I work through lunch and work late without payment because we are so understaffed. I am only billing for my time; any business purchases go through them.

Then, after I sent October’s invoice a month later, she said: “I’m not sure if you’re a slow learner, but I’ve told you already we don’t need increased monthly bills and we are looking to reduce not increase costs.”

Another example from last week: “Call and tell them I WILL NOT be paying the $1400 bill from Boss’s phone.Apparently he went over plan limit. Well I won’t pay it.”

I showed Boss, and he apologized for her rudeness and asked me to call telephone company and get back to Jane. My email: “Hi Jane and Boss, I’ve followed up your invoice with as requested. Attached is a list of all the calls and data used that explains the charges. They suggested you might want to look at moving up to a larger data plan. I asked on your behalf, but they won’t waive your bill unfortunately because there hasn’t been any error on their part, the data did go well over the limit of your current plan and they did send automatic SMS notifications to let you know. They’ve also warned that as the bill payment is so late, if the invoice isn’t paid in the next seven days that they’ll switch off the service to the phone.”

The phone got cancelled and she wrote to me and colleague: “Useless. Both of you.”

What’s your advice on how to communicate that we really don’t want to be involved in their personal finance discussions and that her emails upset us to the point of interrupting our flow of work, we both leave the office feeling super down in the dumps, and it’s slowly chipping away at our motivation to be there?

Obviously, something needs to be done because this is festering for us both. Is it best to bring it up with our boss? He is likely to brush it off and tell us to ignore her. Both of them? We love working there, love our customers, and are working hard for them and both put in unpaid overtime most weeks because we care about the work we do.

Boss claims wife Jane is just moody. We both need the jobs and money (both single parents and flexible job options in Australia are not easy to come by) but it seems in any other normal company, you could take these emails to HR. What do you do when there’s no HR department and you’re not an employee?

First, just to make sure this is clear, your boss’s wife’s behavior is totally ridiculous and unacceptable. I thinkyou know that, but sometimes when you work around loons, they start changing your norms and your sense of what’s okay. So for the record: This is serious loon territory. (I especially love her utter shock and confusion when you dare to ask to be paidfor your work.)

Anyway, I think you’ve got to decide how much you’re willing to push back on this. In a reasonably healthy workplace, it would be completely appropriate and absolutely not at all unreasonable to say to your boss, “Hey, I am not okay with Jane talking to me this way. She’s being rude and insulting, involving me in your personal finances, and making it hard for me to do my job. Can you please ensure that she stops?”

Now, obviously, you’re notworking in a healthy workplace, but that fact alone doesn’t mean that your boss wouldn’t be responsive tothis kind of statement. There’s a decent chance, in fact, that right now he’s just taking the path of least resistance — and since you and your coworker so far have let Jane get away with her behavior, it’s easier for him to just allow it— but that if you said “no more” and meant it, he’d find it easier to tell her to chill out than to lose both of you or to have to deal with two really unhappy employees.

Or perhaps not. This is his wife, and it’s possible he’ll coddle her at all costs… but if he has any sense, he’ll realize that this will be an issue with the employees after you too, and that eventually he’ll need to address it.

Anyway, there’s no way to really predict with certainty, but unless you think he’ll fire you for setting boundaries, I’d speak up. It’s possible he could fire you, but it’s prettyunlikely. The more likely bad outcome is that it just doesn’t doesn’t resolve the situation.

And if you do end up there — with her behavior continuing after you’vesaid “this isn’t okay and it needs to stop” — then at that point you’ll need to decide if you’re willing to put up with Jane’s behavior as a condition of the job. If that happens, then a a minimum I’d say that you should look elsewhere and see what your options might be; you shouldn’t assume that you’re stuck until you’ve actually tried to leave.

And this is indeed worth leaving over, if your boss refuses to deal with it. You’re being routinely insulted andforced to deal with an angry, hostile loon.

Read an update to this letter here.