It Feels Like a.... Monday?

It is difficult to have your “Monday” be everyone else's Friday.

I work five days and have two days off, like a typical work-week. However my weekend happens to be Wednesday-Thursday. Which means yesterday when I walked (more like trudged) into work, I had a case of the ‘Mondays.’

I work the closing shift on Fridays and Saturdays which is 2pm-10pm. The idea of ‘10pm’ is more fancifully than accurate; on a good day I clock out at around 10:30, on a night that makes my very bones weary- 11:30 to midnight.

For all the busyness (DSG does 40-50% of the week’s business on Friday/Saturday) I like closing the store on weekends. The near continuous stream of customers, managing more cashiers on the floor than any other day of the week, it all makes the hours pass bye much quicker than a sleepy paced weekday shift.

 None of the other CSSs want to shoulder the shift because they want to go out and do all the social things they expect to get out of a Friday or Saturday night. I figured out a long time ago the way to avoid becoming extremely frustrated with this job’s scheduling (that it is sucking all your social life time away) is to readjust one’s perspective and expectations for the days of the week.

The term “Friday night” cues up images of various forms of release pent up by a five day work week. Going to the movies, meeting up with friends for dinner/drinks, staying in and watching all the shows built up on your DVR- in general, Friday night is viewed as one’s ‘reward’ for completing 40 hours of drudgery. Friday night is owed to the worker.

“Saturday night” conjures similar visions of self-indulgence and freedom from the time clock; albeit with a more ‘party’ angled skew. Friday is to reclaim your soul from The Man, Saturday is to let loose and prove you’re still alive.

My co-workers glare at the schedule begrudgingly when they see they have been scheduled for Friday and/or Saturday. They feel the nights meant to be dedicated solely to them have been stripped away to be replaced with work.

I don’t mind at all because to me, Friday is Monday and Saturday is Tuesday. My schedule I have been keeping for the past few months is as such:

Friday -> Monday

Saturday -> Tuesday

Sunday-> Wednesday

Monday -> Thursday

Tuesday -> Friday

Wednesday -> Saturday

Thursday -> Sunday

It did take me time to adjust to the new alignment of days. And there are drawbacks. No one really wants to go out for drinks till 1 in the morning on a Tuesday night. When I sleep in on my ‘Saturday’ I awake to find my family all gone, off to work, because to the rest of the world it is only unglamorous Wednesday.

One oddity resulting from new schedule was wholly unexpected: my loss of the sense of what the day should “feel like.”

Everyone has said the sentence “It feels like such a __INSERT DAY OF THE WEEK__.” 

Monday has the connotation of negative vibes- the return to work after the weekend, the four more days stretching out tediously before you obtain another break.

Tuesday has the great benefit of not being Monday.

Wednesday is the middle of the week, the middle child who doesn’t belong anywhere. Does poor Hump Day mean the week is halfway done… or half is still to go?

Thursday, like Tuesday, gets its definition of feeling from its nearness to another day- in this case, Friday.

Friday. We have discussed Friday and it’s weekend buddy Saturday.

Sunday, the day of rest. A peaceful day for church, bike rides and being sad Monday is looming on the horizon.

I feel disconnected from the “normal” people who work a typical schedule because I can no longer ‘sense’ what day it is. It seems a silly thing to care about; my co-workers talk of feeling like it’s definitely Friday, and I stand at my register, confused, because I truly feel it is Monday.

When I was teaching I most certainly had a grasp of what day it was. I kept the standard work week and claimed my Friday and Saturday nights fiercely.

Now I sit here preparing for my Tuesday night. The rest of the world will fill my store on their way to the movies, or to go shop, or just a brief stop-over in the celebration of their Saturday night festivities.

I don’t look at them with any sense of envy. It’s okay, it’s only Tuesday.