I've got a bad case of the Sundays. It used to be Mondays that got me down but the stench of the beginning of the work week had wafted over to Sunday. I read a statistic once that more people die of heart attacks between 8am and 10am Monday morning that at any other time of the week. So when the work week begins, some people believe they’re better off swimming with the fishes than spending one more minute at work. Pablo Picasso said “the secret to success is making your vocation your vacation”; but few can spend the day painting or playing golf or surfing the internet for porn and still make their mortgage payment.
Sunday has now become the day I loathe. It was once Sunday night but that evening dread has spilled over into the afternoon. And if I decide to stay up late on Saturday night and hit the snooze a few times, the day is gone. Saturday has become the new Sunday and Sunday is slowly transforming into Monday. When I wake on Sunday, I feel like it’s the split second before I get punched in the face in a fight when I see it coming and I know it’s going to hit me but I don't have time to react. Sunday is now the day I fear and I start thinking about it on Saturday night.
If you rise early on Sunday, you at least enjoy half the day. Now it may seem like you’ve lost half a day but it just more of a shift. Friday used to be a full work day but that email has been sent. I always remember running through the finish line of 5pm on Fridays. Nowadays, it’s tough to schedule a meeting, a working lunch or get anyone on the phone on the south side of 10:45am. Somewhere around noon time, there are tumbleweeds blowing through the office. I check my personal email, I open Yahoo messenger to see who is online and I start calling people to make Saturday plans. Why waste my time doing these things at home when I can’t get anything done at work anyway?
Mondays aren’t as productive as they used to be. Meetings have ruined the way Mondays used to operate. Every meeting I’ve ever attended has started at least fifteen minutes beyond its original start time. We all take time pouring our coffee and choosing our doughnut (that doesn’t look right spelled that way – the Dunkin Donuts people have ruined us in that respect) and bitching about the fact that we had to settle for the doughnut we chose because our favorite wasn’t there and whoever ordered the doughnuts should have checked with everyone concerning the doughnut choices. Then it’s another ten minutes finding a seat that allows us to be far enough to be able to text during the meeting but close enough to not get called on like a fourth grader sitting in the back of the room. Monday mornings have become like that first fifteen minutes.
Thursday, which used to have a feel, now tastes like diet rice cakes with no liquids within 10,000 yards to help choke them down. Thursday is not technically Friday but you can’t get a whole lot done because everyone around you is preparing for happy hour or in weekend mode.
I believe that in business, nothing happens before 12pm on Monday and after Wednesday at 5pm. Lunches aside, the forty hour workweek has been reduced to about twenty-one hours. And if there any meetings scheduled during that time, which we all know are about ten percent actual content, my twenty-one hour theory is blown all to hell. So if you’re out on Tuesday or Wednesday, you might as well be out for the entire week.
I did a little research and I discovered that all of our great inventions were created on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Eli Whitney and the cotton gin was a Tuesday at around 10am. At around noontime, Bell made the first phone call and Edison shed some light on things at approximately 4:55pm that afternoon. If his watch was fast that day, we might still be in the dark. The Wright brothers’ famed flight three feet over Kitthawk, North Carolina was scheduled to depart at 10am on Wednesday morning. And even our beloved sitcom Seinfeld was conceived on hump day just after lunch. If Tuesday and Wednesday had never been invented, we’d be living like the Flintstones and banging two rocks together to light a cigarette.
I’d love to continue but this is being written at 4:58pm on a Wednesday and I’m planning a party this weekend.
