I miss Fridays.
More specifically, I miss that Thank God It’s Friday feeling one has when one is slogging along in a Monday through Friday job.
When I first started working at my last job, I was expected to show up on Saturday mornings because the office was open until noon. “Showing the flag…” is a concept I never bought into. Just because the boss was in the office didn’t make the employees feel any more valuable or hate working on Saturday any less.
I always hated that, so eventually I convinced the owners that having the office open on Saturday morning with a skeleton staff to take care of three or four customers wasn’t really necessary. Of course what I really meant was: I HATE having to come to work on Saturday morning.
We had a strong online presence so 90% of customer service issues could be accomplished by visiting the newspaper website.
So those of us who showed up on Saturday just screwed around. Some tried to “save work” from Monday through Friday so do on Saturday to make the time go more quickly.
They were rare.
Of course we had a newsroom that showed up at various hours on Saturday to do their thing for the Sunday newspaper, and there was a production schedule that included Saturday work.
But there’s nothing like that Thank God It’s Friday feeling when it means Saturday and Sunday are available for just screwing around.
I like being retired because every day is available for screwing around.
But sometimes I Forget It’s Friday.
Mark Van Patten originally wrote this for his blog Going Like Sixty circa 2008 and we republished it on BoomSpeak. We just liked it so much we’re running it again in hopes that we can get him to contribute more for us. Oh, and yeah, he has been married to the same woman since 1968.
