Wow. When I was looking at the calendar a month ago, and noticing that July 4th was on a Wednesday, I said to myself: that's really going to suck monkeys' udders. It falls too far from both Sunday and Friday for there to be any association with either weekend! But now that it's here, I've changed my tune to Yankee Doodle and I'm beating it to a different drum. In short: I am absolutely loving the 1-Day Weekend. I think that we should look seriously at moving July 4th to a permanent Wednesday placement. But we should do more than just that. Every week should have a "Wednesday off" in the middle!
Plenty of places allow a 10 hour day, four day work week. But they generally schedule your four work days straight in a row! Talk about a recipe for burnout. Yet: suppose they didn't? What if it was Saturday-Sunday off, Monday-Tuesday 10-hour days, Wednesday OFF!, Thursday-Friday 10-hour days? Picture coming in Monday knowing you have Wednesday just waiting there for you, smack in the middle of the week - a nice little siesta! Imagine never having to work more than two days in a row. Yet you'd still have a full 2-day weekend to back it up, and a productive 40-hour work week!
CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW SWEET THAT WOULD BE?? Work-related burnout would be a thing of the past!
Obviously we're only talking about people who work the standard Mon-Fri grind, here. Your transportation workers, restaurant and hotel staff, cops, emergency workers...well, all of those people are union anyway, right? They're covered under a separate agreement.
But for the workaday office worker, what a new day to dawn this would be. What a boon! And as we stand here, on the week of our Founding Parents' 231nd Anniversary of their Declaration of Intent...it's like a sweet preview for you, of what my sweet proposal would be like.
Thank God they signed that thing up on the 4th. If it had been the 3rd or the 5th, I might never have had it occur to me. And when you think upon what sort of a razor's edge that coincidence hangs...! When would be the next opportunity for that to have happened? For it to fall on a Wednesday, equidistant from both proximate weekends? Here's a mathematical projection of the next time when that might happen: probably not for a thousand years.
That's due to Leap Year interference. The ancients never had to deal with that. They just had a wide clump of days during March which they referred to as the "Ides." They would make this clump of days longer or shorter, depending on how close they got it the year before. A far better system - and one which later gave rise to the saying: "the Ides of March."
You'll pardon me if I take in a wide range of topics. That just shows you how broad my open mind can get.
And nothing's more U.S.A. than that!
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