In a Holidaze

Owww.

The week immediately following a holiday weekend can be remarkably difficult to get through. Sure, your body is used to having 2 days off, back-to-back, but it’s that third one that throws you all out of whack. Suddenly, you’ve gained LM, lazy momentum. LM will cause you on that first day back to oversleep, drag your feet on the way to work, and spend the first hour at your desk wondering how you burned through three days of leisure so quickly. You can also blame LM for pressing the wrong floor in the elevator, spilling your morning beverage, and accidentally calling your boss dude. There’s no transition period in your triumphant return to work either. Just a stack of paper as tall as Christina Toms waiting for you. (After all, you did leave work early on Friday telling yourself it all would still be there when you got back Tuesday. Well, you were right.)

While the workload is there on that first Tuesday back, the energy to battle it may not. Do not be alarmed if you’ve been working for five hours and it feels like twenty-seven. This is perfectly normal. Since the 4th of July was a national holiday, everyone around you feels the same way. Expect the afternoon to be slower than The English Patient. Yawn.

Now my personal plight is a little more severe. Because of the insane amount of traveling I did two weekends ago, I took off that following Monday to rest and unglue my hands from the steering wheel. At the time, that seemed like a wise decision (it’s very hard to type on a computer with a steering wheel affixed to your palms.) In retrospect, I am now the recipient of two consecutive four day work weeks.

I know what you’re thinking. Stop complaining and bring some funny about paper clips or something. I will eventually (Paper clips? Is that the best you can come up with?), but I’ve got a bigger crisis on my hands. With two 4-day weeks in a row, I know that next week is going to be absolute torture. Why?

I am going to have to work five days. In a row.

I work 5-day weeks for a living. But once you pair two 4-day weeks in a row, this is when your LM kicks it into high gear. By next Friday, LM will so be ready to fall asleep on a couch somewhere that I may start uncontrollably running into things and not feel the associated pain.

Granted, this particular instance is my fault. I was the one who took off two Mondays ago. But there are other times in the working year where LM gets to overrun your productivity due to overkill. Something must be done to prevent this, and YAB is just the blog to do it.

Three day weekends are a wonderful thing. The occasional shortened week can really pick you up from the throes of repetition. My company provides us with 9 holidays a year and most of them do fall on Mondays. But here’s the problem, of these nine holidays, five of them fall between November and January. That leaves ONLY four for the other nine months. That’s why Presidents’ Day Memorial Day, 4th Of July, and Labor Day are so important. They are isolated on the calendar, far away from their holiday brethren.

So I am proposing a more even spacing of the nine given holidays. There’s 52 weeks in the year, and even spacing would place one holiday every 5-6 weeks. Doesn’t that seem better. Now this may mean you need to work on some important days, but you can thank me later when you have off on some different days while the rest of the world works.

Condon’s Holiday Schedule…
November 24 – Thanksgiving Day
December 25 – Christmas Day
February 2 – Groundhog Day
March 14 – Mothers Day in the Russian Republic of Georgia
April 19 – Venezuelan Declaration of Independence Day
May 30 – Memorial Day
July 4 – Fourth of July
September 5 – Labor Day
October 10 – Anniversary of the Foundation of the Korean Workers’ Party

Happy holidays.