As regular readers of this blog know, my wife Cindy is also my business partner in Crescenzo Communications. And by “partner” I mean “the glue that holds everything together and prevents this entire enterprise from careening off the track at any given moment.”

Cindy can do it all. In addition to running the company books, dealing with the IRS and the lawyers (a full-time job in and of itself) solving all the IT problems (a full-time job in and of itself) and dealing with me (a full-time job in and of itself) Cindy also does client work.

Her biggest strengths are doing surveys and focus groups. But she’s also a good presenter, comes up with creative ideas for clients, knows her way around Sharepoint, can create Web sites and podcasts from scratch, has a background in marketing, and can even write better than a lot of trained writers I know.

In short, she is what the business people would call “an asset” to the organization. In fact, in my president's column in last year's Crescenzo Communications Annual Report, I wrote that "Cindy is our greatest asset," and I meant it.

But with all she brings to the table, Cindy’s greatest talent is project management. She’s just one of those people who knows how to keep a multi-faceted, complicated project running like a well-oiled machine.

Which is nice, because I suck at project management. I suck at projects, period, let alone trying to manage them. Before Cindy came on board, I would routinely get phone calls from clients, who would ask questions such as:

“Our project ended five months ago. Are you ever going to invoice us?”

“We’re doing a three-month major employee communications audit . . . shouldn’t we have some sort of a timeline? Or maybe a to-do list? Or, I don't know, a schedule?”

“We’re all at the Hilton waiting for the in-house seminar to start. Where are you?” (I was across town, at a different Hilton.)

Cindy now takes every project we start and manages it. She does schedules and task lists and deliverable dates and follow-up plans and status meetings and all sorts of other neat stuff that I never even knew existed.

She has saved the company numerous times, and for that I am grateful. But, I have to say, there is a downside to living with a project manager. A big downside.

Why? Because project managers are capable of using their God-given project-management skills for insidious purposes. They can and will use their capacity for being organized to further their own secret and selfish agendas at the expense of the unorganized saps they live with.

I’m not talking about all the times she tells me a client report is due three weeks before it’s actually due, because she knows I’ll be two weeks late with it anyway. That’s done for the company, and for the client.

No . . . I’m talking about when she uses her incredible capacity for organizing and analyzing data to further her own Machiavellian agenda, at my expense. Let me give you just one an example:

Cindy right now is involved with a huge project in Topeka, Kansas, that requires her to be down there for three weeks out of the month. It’s a great project, and Cindy adores the client, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.

But it is a little weird not having her around. Usually, I’m the one traveling and she’s the one home alone. So life is a little upside down right now.

Now you should know that since we both work full time, Cindy and I share the household duties. I do all the cooking, Cindy cleans the bathroom. We take turns emptying the dishwasher. I take out the garbage, Cindy keeps the fireplace room neat and cozy. I initiate sex, Cindy pretends that 87 seconds is exactly the right amount of time it should take.

And so on. We have our jobs. Well, one of Cindy’s jobs is to empty the cat litter box. She empties the bad stuff into a bag, puts the bag on the balcony, and then I bring it down with the garbage. We have a system.

Cindy hates doing it, but who doesn't?

But the last couple of weeks, I've had to empty the cat litter box, because Cindy was in Topeka, and the stench was so bad that it couldn’t wait until she got home.

Now, it’s important to note that Cindy is only in Topeka from Monday morning to Wednesday night. If she emptied it before she left Monday morning, it would be fine until she got home Wednesday night. Not perfect, but fine.

And that’s what she used to do . . . before she started project managing the situation. Now, every week, the damn cat box starts to pour forth a horrific stench on Tuesday morning, at exactly 11 a.m. Always. I can set my watch by it, if I had a watch.

And I have no choice but to clean it. And I know for God damn certain that this is not happening by accident. I know that Cindy has engineered this.

I know that she studied the bowel patterns of the beasts, gauged how many hours she could go between changes, analyzed the data, and then timed her last change so that everything would blow up on me while she was gone.

I would bet my life that, were I able to hack into her computer, I would find a “project file” with the name: “Cat Poop Protocol,” or something like that. Or maybe, since she's such a sneaky little snake, she would disguise it, and call it "Waste Management Audit," or "Debris Deliverable Report," or something.

But it's there. I know it's there.

And in that file there are spreadsheets and timelines and schedules and all the other tools of her sinister science, all of which she used to project manage the poop schedule down not to the day, but to the hour . . . and quite possibly to the minute.

Talk about an evil genius.

Communicators: Beware the “project managers.” They have skills that we don’t have. And they know how to manage more than projects. They know how to secretly manage our lives.

I want to thank my pal and myragan.com blogger Eileen Burmeister for bringing one of the strangest corporate stories I’ve ever seen to my attention.

In Eileen’s hometown of Roseburg, Oregon, there used to be a Dell call center. But last August, they closed it down.

No big deal, right? Dell’s in trouble, and when they close a call center, it’s not exactly news. But here’s the weird part:

They decided to tell the 220 employees the news on "Pajama Day"—a fun event planned by store managers to boost sagging morale. A day where everybody could wear pajamas to work.

No, this isn’t a story out of The Onion. It really happened.

The web site, www.newsreview.info, reported on the story: “Left in the dark about the closure until a 10 a.m. meeting, about 220 workers in slippers and bathrobes shuffled out of the white building in the North Roseburg Plaza for the last time.”

To be honest, I don’t know which is more disturbing: that a company would sponsor a “Pajama Day” in the first place, or that they would use the occasion to lay everybody off.

Whenever I see insane corporate decisions like this one, I always try to imagine the scene in the conference room when the decision was made. This one must have gone something like this:

Scene: The plant manager and his number two man are sitting in the manager's office. The plant manager is on the phone. The number two man has a sleepy, content look on his face.

Plant Manager(hanging up the phone): That’s it. That was corporate. We’re done. We’re closing the plant. Send out an e-mail to all employees after I leave for the day.

Number Two Man: Uh . . . shouldn’t we maybe tell them face to face? E-mail is a little cold, isn’t it?

Plant Manager (who starts fiddling with his Blackberry): Whatever. E-mail’s easier. But if you want to do it face to face, you can tell them tomorrow. I’m outta here. Corporate has reassigned me to Tacoma. They’re in a world of shit up there, too.

Number Two Man: Uh . . . I don’t think telling them tomorrow is a good idea, sir.

Plant Manager: Why not?

Number Two Man: Tomorrow is Pajama Day.

Plant Manager (finally puts his Blackberry down): What? What the hell is Pajama Day?

Number Two Man: Uh . . . someone thought it would help morale if we let everyone come to work in their pajamas. You know, like a fun thing. Pajamas are fun.

Plant Manager: No they’re not.

Number Two Man: Yes they are.

Plant Manager: No they're not. Sex is fun. Pajamas just get in the way of sex. Besides, they haven’t had a raise in three years, we’ve cut their benefits every year for five years running, and they’ve been living with the threat of the plant closing for seven months. What horse’s ass thought letting them come to work in their pajamas would boost morale?

Number Two Man (who came up with the idea for Pajama Day, and who is right now wearing pajamas under his suit because he has a pajama fetish, and who has had a raging erection since the first time the word “Pajama” was said out loud): Uh . . . I can find out, sir. Pajamas. I'll find out about Pajama day. I'll find out who wanted everyone to wear Pajamas. Pajamas.

Plant Manager: What? Don’t bother. We’re all out of a job anyway. I can’t believe I can’t fire anyone over this. Well you know what? If you think wearing pajamas is good for morale, they’re going to need a good shot of morale juice now more than ever. Tell ‘em tomorrow . . . maybe the pajamas will help them get through it.

Number Two Man: Say Pajamas again.

Plant Manager: What?

Number Two Man: Tomorrow is Pajama Day.

Plant Manager: What the hell is the matter with you?

Number Two Man: I . . . uh . . . enjoyed working with you and uh . . . pajama pajama pajama . . .

Maybe it didn't go down like that. But do you have a better explanation?

Out here at Corporate Hallucinations, we talk a lot about executive communication. Usually, I like to make fun of it . . . because so many executives are so bad at it.

Face it: it’s fun to make fun of those constipated-looking white guys on page two of the employee publication, with their stupid signature on the bottom of the page, as if they are trying to say: “Hey, I swear, I wrote this column myself! Look, I even signed it! I must have wrote it, because I signed it! That’s my signature, right there on the bottom!”

But while it’s easy to have some laughs at their expense, every once in a while I see an example of bad executive communication that’s not funny at all. Once a year or so, I’ll come across a case where poor—or worse, dishonest—CEO communication really hurts the employees. I mean, really hurts them.

In fact, this just happened to me personally.

First, you have to understand that, even though I work for myself and have my own company, I consider Mark Ragan of Ragan Communications to be my CEO.

Mark hired me right out of college 16 years ago. He gave me the chance to edit the Ragan Report, Ragan’s flagship newsletter, even though I only had a year’s worth of experience at the time. He took a flyer on me and put me on the road to do seminars, something I love doing.

Mark has opened doors for me throughout my career. So even though I now have my own company, I still consider Mark to be my CEO. I sometimes even call him “Chief” just to irritate him.

So when Mark tells me something, it means a lot, because it’s coming from the CEO. Just like at any other organization where employees want and need to trust the CEO, I want and need to trust Mark.

But I’m not sure I can do that anymore. And there’s a lesson here for communicators. Here’s the story:

Mark, as some of you may know, was diagnosed last year with prostate cancer. He is doing great, and all tests are good, and he somehow has more energy than ever. Which is a scary concept to Ragan employees everywhere.

But he’s been telling any male who will listen—and, since he’s the CEO, we all listen—to get a PSA test. That’s the test that indicates whether you might have prostate cancer.

Well, I was in the office the other day, and I happened to mention to Mark that I was going to the doctor to get a checkup.

“Get that Goddamned PSA test,” he said. “I met guys in treatment younger than you who had prostate cancer. You better get it done.”

Now, as a guy, just the very word “prostate” scares me. It conjures up visions of rubber gloves and pain and horrific invasions into places that are sacred to me. So I’d rather just not think about it at all.

Mark, being Mark, a trained reporter, sensed my hesitation. “It’s just a blood test,” he told me. “All they’re going to do is take some blood. It’s that easy. The doctor will tell you that you’re too young to worry about it, but you need to insist on it.”

A blood test? I could handle a blood test, I said to myself. Any sissy could handle a blood test. So when I went to the doctor, I told him I wanted a PSA test.

“You’re a little young,” he said—just like Mark, my CEO, said he would.

Thanks to my CEO, however, I was ready for that particular line of bullshit.

“No, I’m not,” I said, with what I hoped was a steely look of determination in my eyes. “My friend Mark just battled prostate cancer, and he told me he met tons of guys my age who were going through it. I really want that test.”

Now, I don’t know if I pissed the doctor off by telling him his business, or what. But he looked at me for a while, before he finally said:

“Okay. I also want to check your prostate,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “That’s what the PSA test is. Test away, my good man. Test away.”

But that’s not what he meant.

“I also want to do a digital rectum exam,” he said.

Digital! Rectum! Exam! Those are exactly the words I didn’t want to hear! Those are the words I’ve been afraid of since I knew what a rectum was!

And I’m not stupid. I knew “digital” didn’t mean electronic, as in a clock. It meant digits, as in fingers. As in fingers and knuckles and fingernails and all of those things getting intimate with my rectum.

But, God help me, it was too late to back off. And I can only say this: If Mark Ragan were within reach at that moment in time, I would have given him a digital rectum exam with the doctor’s stethoscope, followed by that little tool they stick in your ears and throat, before finishing up with a chair leg.

Before I could even realize what was happening, I was laying on my side, while the doctor made small talk and greased up what must have been four or five digits, and a limb, and stuffed them into my rectal test area. In this particular doctor’s office, “digital” apparently meant: “entire arm.”

I was too shaken up afterwards to look at the doctor’s hands, but this guy had to have been a cross between Herman Munster and a Polish pipe fitter.

And as I made my way home, walking a little like a dog that has just been fixed, I realized that a part of me could never trust my CEO again, because he didn’t tell me the whole truth.

He left out the hard part, the part he thought I wouldn’t want to hear, or couldn’t handle . . . which is what CEOs tend to do when it comes to employee communication. They sugarcoat. They spin. They think employees can’t handle the truth.

The lesson for communicators is obvious:

Make sure your CEO tells employees the whole story—even the bad news. Especially the bad news. In fact, make sure they understand the bad news first, before anything else. Because if the bad stuff gets sprung on them unawares, you’ll never be able to build that trust back again.

Telling someone about a “restructuring” but leaving out the “layoffs” part is like telling them to take a blood test and neglecting to tell them they’re about to take it up the ass.