Workplace Nightmares·
MIA IN THE HOME OFFICE
Nine months of unpaid commissions strain a husband and wife, until a decisive update unveils a plan to pivot toward real work and rebuild their partnership.
Keep waiting, or walk away?
Be one of the first to vote.
For nine months, a wife poured 6 to 7 hours a day into a "sales" job and brought home exactly nothing.
Her husband says she worked on 100% commission, spent her days locked in a home office, and demanded not to be interrupted. With three kids in the house, that arrangement left him carrying the rest. He works full time, pays for everything, and gets off work at noon, but when he's home, he says she is "MIA until dinner time."
The problem wasn't just the absence. It was the cost.
According to the husband, she wasn't simply waiting for a payoff. She was spending money to buy her own leads, paying out of pocket for the chance to make a commission that never came. "She hasn't made a penny," he wrote, adding that she had "literally not made a single penny" and that the whole setup had turned into "negative profit."
He says he wouldn't care if she didn't have a job at all and stayed home with the children. What got under his skin was the way the job swallowed her. She was hidden away in the office, unavailable for chores or family time, listening to "agent academy" and other motivational lectures while the house and kids waited. He felt like he was working, paying the bills, and watching her disappear behind a closed door.
That's what led him to ask, "AITA for complaining about this?"
In the update, the tension finally broke. The couple had a long fight, then talked it through. This time, the conversation moved somewhere new.
She decided to use her insurance license to look for a "real opportunity," stop buying leads from the company they were with, and try alternate lead-generating sites while she job hunts. She also admitted something blunt: she did not see a future there, but she felt like she couldn't just give up and admit defeat.
The husband said the argument helped her see the situation more clearly. "I think she sees the light now," he wrote. He said the experience gave her some social and emotional growth, and that they worked out a compromise going forward.
What started as nine months of unpaid commission work and growing resentment ended with a plan to step away from the dead end and look elsewhere.