MONDAY!It is the cruel calender maker's worst prank ever and he still manages to catch all of us with it at least four times a month. It has been described as both "manic" and "blue" in popular music titles. It is the sad, silent roadie that sweeps up the stage after we've lived out the climax of Loverboy's song "Everybody's working for the weekend". It is the point in time that we sober up, return to our respective jobs with broken noses, and realize that despite Elton John's opinion, Saturday night was not alright for fighten'.
What is it about this day that we find so hard to swallow? We know it's coming up and we still can't find a defense against it. Even the Lord himself set it in writing that "resting.... resting you stupid, sinning, imperfect humans", is a pretty good idea when you've been working all week.
My first observation on the matter pertains to the natural course of events. With Monday being the first day of our week, it has a one hundred percent chance of being the absolute worst day our week for twenty four hours. No other day holds that kind of daunting statistic in its corner.
But most people don't look at it like that. The general work force of our country can be divided into two kinds of regretful Monday partakers. To simplify things we will call them "Dreaders" "Regreters" , and "Realizationist".
The normal working stiff generally hates his station in life as a rule. As children, we are born with this ignorant, carefree nature that allows us to embrace the idea of spinning around in circles until we're almost sick or eating paint chips in our grandfather's tool shed. We start smoking and listening to music we'll all laugh over ten years later when we're teenagers because we're free and that's what we're going to do. We tell the managers at part time fast food jobs to do whatever sexual act they can do to themselves when they ask us to work late because we are free. Then we get married, have kids, go through cars, and pile up bills. Now, just as nothing is free, we are no longer free. For a set amount of time each week we have to go to a place we hate and deal with a mixture of people we can tolerate and people we absolutely loathe with every fiber of our being, while performing a menial task that makes some of the people we loathe much wealthier than us. This is work. This is what we have to do because that is the way of the world. But then it's all over after that forty hours is logged and we clock out on our way out the door. We are free again! Let's see who wants to take the boat out or grab some beers or watch the Travel Channel and live vicariously through someone else. Whatever it is, we have what's left of our freedom and we are out to live it until it kills us. When this type of person, "The Dreader", hears his Monday morning alarm clock, it sounds like a prisoner's shackles being put back on after yard time. To return to the job he hates, in his mind, is a fate worse than death. Though a large majority of Dreaders return on the upswing as early as Tuesday morning, some stay in their slump up until lunch time on Fridays.
Now the Regreter is a different kind of beast. He has accepted his station in life as a means to the the all important end of survival. This is the guy that works three month turnarounds or comes in on the weekend to tie up loose ends for the upper management. People hang around with him after work in the evening long enough to realize he either isn't going to shut up about what's happening at work or he runs them off because he has a long day ahead of him tomorrow. It's on Monday mornings that he realizes he's still making the same money as the jerk off at the water cooler that never works weekends and a lot less than the even bigger jerk off that went fishing with the boss this weekend. Then he starts thinking about the soccer games he's missed and how he feels like he's sleeping next to a stranger every night. Why are his stories about the new filing system that he over hauled not as good as some punk intern writing his phone number on his social security card at a bar and giving it to some college chick? The things in life he missed are the things he regrets.
However, the third division of people come from living their lives as either Dreaders or Regreters. It comes along more often for some, but the majority of people go through the realization state of some particularly bad Monday. These are the Mondays that it sets in that not only do you not enjoy what you do for a living, the people you do it for do not appreciate you nearly as much as they should. Your significant other wouldn't be able to have a part time job while raising kids and maintaining the house if you weren't at this job. Your kids wouldn't be living it up in public schools and reading books from the library if you weren't generating revenue through your income tax. And potential. You used to have so much potential that your fifth grade teacher would cry if she saw you working away at a job that a monkey could be trained to do. These are the hardest Mondays to swallow, and sometimes lead to nights of hard drinking, drug use, stealing a cop car, crashing it into a nursing home and abandoning it, streaking past a day care, stealing the day care bus, and driving it off of cliff only to wake up days later in a full body cast to your boss calling to see when you're coming back to work because that report on the McMillan account needs to be in by .......
MONDAY!!!!!!!!!
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