Shier than what?

Monday, Monday

You know there are days when you have a million things on you mind and you have no idea how to prioritize them and get through everything?

Today is the exact opposite for me. Simply put I have nothing on my brain at all. Surprising to some, obvious to most!

I woke up this morning so damn happy that it was Sunday, only to realize that my alarm doesn’t ring on Sunday…therefore meaning it was Monday. Perhaps that extra beer on Thursday night, or the two extras on Friday, maybe even the extra vat of red wine on Saturday retarded my metabolism and caused my body to feel it had missed a day…Perhaps on the other hand, it was merely the result of getting old and not being able to rebound like I used to. Either or, I have a distasted today for Mondays. By 10:30 this morning, the energy I was storing was leaking out of me faster than Three Mile Island. By 2 this afternoon, I was almost asleep, and by 5 I was most likely legally dead by some standards. The saddest truth for me is that this is following a 3 day work week – I am supposed to be well rested at this point.

All of this makes you wonder who is the big brainiac who decided that the 5 day work week and two day weekend is the way of the world. Well it made me wonder this, so I looked it up…By most accounts the 5 day/40 hour work week is attributed to Henry Ford. There are possibly 457 good lines there, but I will take the high road on them all! It a pretty interesting thing to look up (when you are bored and are contemplating watching a replay of the Waltons that is), the work week is a diverse and funky thing, that obviously is different from one country to the next. While few of us work a 40 hour week, our salaries and compensation is based on this number. In Canada the work week is anything up to 44 hours, thereafter the employer must pay overtime pay. The US is capped at 40, UK at 48. So all in all, we’re mostly a 8-9 hour per day world. The US and Canada have unwritten/written rules and laws that net out holiday to about 10 paid days plus Stat holidays. The UK starts at 20 paid days. Hmmm, Australia starts at 28 and Austria starts at 36 days. I know where I am moving to next. At the end of the day we have it pretty good here, but this new world, the world of convenience is getting out of control – making rest, relaxation and re-energizing very difficult to do, while it is probably the most important thing we could be doing.

To you I pose this question:

If you could which of the following options would make you happier:

1. Shorter work week, less vacation
2. Longer work week, more vacation

I will post the results in the weeks and months to come as the three of you (and sometimes four!) read and vote!

posted by G.M. Shier @ Monday, March 30, 2009