Dearest Rachel –
It’s been barely four years, and already I’ve forgotten how to deal with days like this – or how others deal with days like this.
Of course, since you never had a nine-to-five weekday workday job yourself, you wouldn’t exactly be the person to ask about this issue. Not that it really was an issue, as such; if the workplace was open on a given day, one shows up at the job. It isn’t as if one has a say in the matter.
But it’s a peculiar thing, when the weekend ends, you show up at the office, and at the end of the day, you get another tiny weekend in the form of a holiday right after you just started the work week. A day like today becomes a space between the spaces, the one thing preventing everybody from enjoying a four-day weekend. It’s got all the drag-yourself-in-the-door lethargy of a Monday combined with the oh-goody-tomorrow’s-a-day-off inattention of a Friday in a single eight-hour period; the worst of both worlds, from an employer’s standpoint. So why even bother to open your doors in the first place?
It’s why most federal holidays these days have been moved to Mondays, even those meant to commemorate people’s birthdays (like MLK’s), which you’d think wouldn’t change from year to year by definition. Meanwhile, Washington and Lincoln have had theirs erased and consolidated into a single event called Presidents’ Day. It’s just easier for all concerned to make these things into three-day weekends, rather than interrupting a work week just as it’s getting started.
But somehow, the Fourth of July (or rather, Independance Day, but we all call it by its date, like the Mexicans with their Cinco de Mayo) stubbornly refuses to allow itself to be moved around to better fit people’s work schedules, whether employee or employer. The former finds themself competing against their colleagues to wangle permission to take the third off as well in order to get a single contiguous mini-vacation, while the latter has to deal with an entire staff (well, most of them, anyway, as they can’t give those coveted days off to everyone in the office at once, for some reason, but probably allowed a few lucky ones to take the day off) who don’t want to be there (well, more so than usual, anyway), and are not likely to be producing value for money.
It’s not quite like any other such intractably mid-week holiday; Thanksgiving often has workplaces giving Friday off (which is why there’s such a crush at the stores that day; if everyone were required to go to their office jobs, would they be doing this?), while both Christmas and New Years tend to have the day before (the ‘eve’) and the day of the main holiday offered as holidays, thus creating a weekend in and of themselves (which, to be fair, can generate a similar problem as this one when one of the pair falls on a Wednesday, leaving either Monday or Friday as its own single day island of work, but at least the employee gets a weekend equivalent on either side).
Anyway, why am I making an issue of this? It’s not like I have any specific ‘office’ hours to keep from day to day. I could go over to the folks’ today (which I did, for an hour, since I was to meet Lars for our weekly walk shortly thereafter. I didn’t even bother to head downstairs and turn on the computer; by the time it warmed up and got to the workspace, it would probably be time to leave, anyway) or not; I could go over tomorrow if I wanted, or not. Holidays don’t mean anything to me; it doesn’t affect my financial situation whether I stay home or go out.
But it does mean I’m dealing with a slow news day, both on a global scale (well, okay, a national one) as well as a personal one, and to be honest, it’s something worth commenting on in and of itself. So there.
In any event, if you’d continue to keep an eye on me, honey, I’d still appreciate it. Oh, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 