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.