Monday…or is it Thursday?

Ken and I were discussing the whole work ethic thing, swapping stories about minimum wage jobs we held when we were kids. We agreed that one benefit of a good work ethic is when you get older, you’re more likely to enjoy your work, since hard workers generally have more choices available to them.

“There are two kind of people,” said Ken. “Those who look forward to Mondays, and those who don’t.”

A good observation, to be sure. But, actually, there is a third type of person: those for whom every day of the week is like every other day; to me, Mondays are the same as Sundays.

There are a lot of us, professional free-lancers, of sorts, who enjoy working most of the time, weekends included. The disadvantage is that hours are long. The advantage, though, is that on those occasions when you really don’t want to work, you don’t have to. I used to ditch school all the time when I was a kid, and I now get that same gleeful feeling a few days a year when I decide to ditch my office. Who says that kicks keep getting harder to find?

But the nine-to-five routine is popular with most folks. Humans crave routine, regular rhythms in life, and predictable patterns. This is, of course, economically expedient. If every store and every office opened and closed subject to the whims of the workers, it would be impossible to transact any business.

And, face it, institutional education is meant to instill the habit of routine at an early age. There’s no need to be in school to get educated; a bright kid with the right books can learn more at home in one hour than in an all day session incarcerated in a classroom. This fact terrifies the educrats, but they have no cause for alarm: the dull, brute rhythms of institutional routine will always be part of America.

But a few free spirits have marched to different drummers. My friend John Wade once observed, “it’s no coincidence that schools look like factories.” John has no formal education at all, and is one of the smartest and best-read people I’ve ever known (he’ll be a famous writer someday).

I once saw a clerical worker in California deny somebody’s request for a file that the clerk had readily at hand in her desk. “I’m on my break now,” she said with an air of moronic triumph. Now there’s routine for you. The entire office knew that this dim heifer would be filling her face with jelly donuts from 10:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. every day, with the precision of an atomic clock. Lunch, of course, was observed with the same regularity. And at 5:00 p.m. sharp–no matter what, regardless if bankers were over and needed some of her help, or auditors (who charge dearly by the hour) were at her elbow–she’d waddle out of the office, head for home, and, I’m sure, settle in for her favorite television show. She took a perverse pride in being as worthless as possible, using the tyranny of the clock as her weapon of choice. She obviously hated her work; work was like poison to her, to be endured in the smallest possible dose. She was, in a word, a loser.

Of course, we all lose eventually to the tyranny of Father time. When the old boy chimes for you, there’s no overtime, no extensions, and no rewind. Whether one likes routine and a degree of predictability, or the two-edged sword of freelancing, Father time has the last laugh. The challenge is, then, to use our allotted years (an uncertain ration, at that) as well as we can.