The labor of love
Blake Heaton said he enjoys it when people hit on his wife Lauryn at work because Blake gets to see the look on their faces when he lets them know she is already taken. Blake, a sophomore in English teaching, said he and Lauryn have worked at Café Rio since they were dating. Now a married couple of nine months, Blake and Lauryn said working together is still not a problem.
“I spent a lot of time waiting for Blake to get off work, and I would help whoever was closing the floor,” Lauryn, a junior in interior design, said. “His manager was trying to find someone to hire, and she was a mutual friend of ours, and she actually called me while I was at work and asked me to come in for an interview when I got off work. I can honestly say I was a little nervous about taking a job there, but it paid more and had more opportunities for promotion, so I took the job.”
Blake, a kitchen manager at Cafe Rio, said working together has advantages.
“It’s so nice to see each other. You can never see the people you love enough as stressful as it may seem,” he said. “I trust her and know that she’s not going to mess up, not to mention whenever I start getting stressed (at work), I can always look at her, which makes me smile.”
Lauryn, front-end manager at Café Rio, said the best thing about having the same shift as Blake is that it’s easier to be in a better mood and be more productive while working.
“I love working with Blake and like I said before, people have said we tend to work better when we work together,” Lauryn said. “We kinda help keep each other stay happy or calm the other one down when something goes wrong.”
A hard part about working together, Lauryn said, is when she has an opposite shift than Blake or when they have different days off.
“We don’t see much of each other,” she said. “It can be hard to plan different activities or find time to get shopping done.”
When Lauryn is at work with Blake she said a hard part of working together is she tends to be “a little more vocal and less patient with the kitchen (staff)” when the orders are not coming out from the kitchen on time.
“When I work with other people, I tend to keep my mouth shut a little longer,” she said.
Even though his general manager likes to give him a hard time about working alongside a spouse, Blake said the manager knows “he can’t make it without us” since Blake and Lauryn work well together.
Trevor Young, who is working on a master’s degree in library science, is in a similar situation. Trevor said he met his wife Chelsea in the workplace. While both continue to work for the Merrill-Cazier Library, Chelsea said the hardest part of working together happened in the beginning of their relationship. Since Trevor was hired as one of her supervisors right after they began dating, Chelsea said she knew she should ask to be moved to the old Merrill Library.
“We knew that [working that closely] was inappropriate,” Trevor said.
Now that they’ve been married for almost three years, Chelsea, who earned her bachelor’s degree in history and law and constitutional studies during 2005 Fall Semester, said she has transferred back to the Merrill-Cazier Library but is in a different department and has a different boss than Trevor.
“I think when we started dating our situation was more complicated with him being my supervisor than it is now,” Chelsea said. “There’s nothing hard (about working together now).”
Trevor, who cannot hire or fire his wife, said he tends to agree with Chelsea.
“But I will point out that sometimes I feel the need to go out of my way to make it so that it doesn’t appear that we’re taking advantage of our situation, spending too much time at work together,” Trevor said.
Chelsea said she also doesn’t want people to see her and Trevor together at work.
“It feels like we have to be better at that than most because we work together at the same place, and now we’re working even closer together,” Chelsea said. “It’s like, I walk past his desk all the time, but I don’t stop every time.”
“Yeah she’ll walk past and she doesn’t acknowledge my existence, and I think that’s good,” Trevor said. “If we are constantly (talking to each other), that projects a very poor image.”
“If people see Trevor and I doing that a lot, they’re going to think I am slacking in my duties because I’m hanging out with Trevor or whatever,” Chelsea said.
Trevor said as long as they are “both on board with this theory” of not taking advantage of their work situation, any possible difficulties surrounding their situation are reduced.
Trevor said his piece of advice for couples deciding if they should work in the same workplace together would be to think it through first.
“If you don’t like being with your spouse, don’t work in the same workplace,” Trevor said.
“It would be an overload if I didn’t like him,” Chelsea said.
Lauryn said the limit of communication with your spouse at work totally depends on the couple.
“Other couples won’t work very well (together); they will spend time flirting, fighting or just talking instead of realizing when you’re at work you’re at work,” she said. “When you get off you can then talk and flirt.”
-britg@cc.usu.edu