Days of the Week, Revised (Read by Tommy on the Air!)

Jack Rogers sent the following letter (response sent from mail@cartalk.com).

I am tired of Mondays. After a long weekend of doing all the things around the house that I so deftly put off all week long, I feel I need to go back to work where life is manageable, but Mondays make me feel rotten....Just the word MONDAY makes me feel like I have been subjected to 12 volumes of "The Best of Car Talk" CDs on sale through the Shameless Commerce division.

So I have devised a plan, and I can think of no place that would see the possibilities of it more than Car Talk with its two resident theoreticians. The plan is so simple that I don't know why it has not been thought of and legislated before now.

Monday is a terrible day. Let's move it to a time in the week when we can better deal with it and all its problems--say Thursday. We put it where Thursday now resides. That leaves the Monday slot open, and that is a perfect place for Wednesday to go, since it is midweek, you have all sorts of energy, and you also know that it's hump day and the weekend is coming. So put Wednesday where we now have Monday.

Tuesday is a day when we are pretty well in the mood to get things going and we have gotten over the problems of Monday. Saturday is a day when we have to get ourselves organized to do the weekend work, so it would be good to give it more organization and energy by moving Tuesday to the Saturday slot.

Tuesday is now open, and we need the optimism of a day like Friday, where we look forward to the weekend. Since the Tuesday slot is so far from the weekend, it would be a real mind-pleaser to move Friday there. Besides, for all who get paid on Friday, it would be good to have some of the money to spend during the week instead of having it all gone by Monday, as it is now.

Now, Thursday is pretty much a do-nothing day, and that is really what Sunday was intended for, until we filled it with all the stuff we dreamed up on Saturday, so we could move Thursday to the Sunday spot. Since most preachers I know of take Thursdays off anyway, it won't matter much to them, and they are the ones who would raise the objections to moving Sunday.

Besides, nowhere in the Bible does it say that God started creating on Sunday....He could have done it on Monday, but then that is a day to put stuff off until later in the week...and maybe he started on Tuesday or Wednesday, and if that is so, then we have been getting the wrong day off for a lot of years.

If we move Saturday to the Friday spot that was left open by moving it to Tuesday, and if we move Sunday to the Saturday spot that was left open by moving it to Friday, actually reversing the days in the current order and moving them up one, we create a wonderful opportunity to do the work we put off on Saturday a day earlier, since we won't have Sunday behind it to put it off to. And for Sunday, we put it in the spot vacated by Thursday and get to enjoy a real nothing day. Now, if this seems impractical because it means moving the calendar days around, I need only remind you of what happens the last Sunday of October and the first Sunday of April each year when we change the speed of the earth's rotation by an hour each time--and nothing in the world happens for an hour (or twice as much happens because there are two hours exactly the same?). And then there is the quadrennial event when the calendar celebrates election year by adding one day of campaigning in February.

This would not be the first time we changed the calendar for convenience. Congress does it all the time when they want to celebrate someone's birthday on a Monday, even though they weren't born on that day. And even before that, George Washington wasn't born when we thought he was, since he was born under a different calendar, which made his birthday really a different day, but no one ever cared that much to get it right.

And we are going to celebrate the new millennium when we get to the year 2000 even though it doesn't really start until 2001, since 2000 is actually the last year of the 20th century.

SO...if we can change the calendar and even the earth's rotation around for all this, why not for a more livable week?

I submit this proposal to you two, because I know that you have the ear of the powers that be--or at least occasionally see Senator Kennedy's car go by.

P.S. I can fit into an XL Car Talk T-shirt, but then sausage fits into its skin, too.

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