I like to catch the early morning news headlines on RTE radio. There is seldom any good news on these bulletins, so I brace myself as the short blast of intro music tenses me up for how the news of today is going to affect me. That’s the holy all of it, dear readers, I selfishly ask myself, what this has got to do with me.
There was a big one this morning – announced with the gravity of tone you might expect if Putin’s army was crossing the Channel in our direction, or a new killer virus had escaped from the lab at a girl’s convent school. Every week it seems as if there is another impending danger for us unfortunate poor scruts and this was yet another big one. The fact is that the current most deadly threat to the future of mankind is the first day of the week, namely Mondays! Yes, friends; all the time when we were distracted through keeping an eye on Friday 13th, it is every Monday which poses the real threat. Monday is a killer …
Research at the Belfast Health and Care Trust and the Royal College of Surgeons have found that you have around a 20 per cent greater risk of a serious heart attack on Monday than any other day of the week. Cardiologist Dr Jack Laffan, who led the research said; ‘We found a strong statistical correlation between the start of the working week and the incidence of STEMI.’ (A heart attack where the coronary artery becomes completely blocked) Maybe all those builders and painters who used to spend Mondays in the pub knew what they were doing after all?
Scientists are unable to fully explain the reasons for the ‘Blue Monday’ phenomenon, but it is thought that the added stress of starting a new working week after two days of enjoyment buggers up the circadian rhythm. Workers make more mistakes and take longer to do tasks on a Monday.
Coming back to the selfish me, I don’t fear that the minacious Monday will get me, because I do little enough any day and I don’t suffer from Monday Blues – except after a Westmeath match. In fact, in another life I had no reason to dread Mondays either. I told you this previously – but anything that might make me look smarter than I am, you will hear it more than once!
I was doing a course and one of the themes was exactly what we are talking about here: the Monday morning syndrome, with its low productivity, rifts among staff and costly errors. When it came to my turn to contribute, I suggested that if they all worked a seven day week, like me, there was never a Monday morning feeling!
But ‘leavin all jokin aside’ – to quote the Lads; there is something in this Monday thing that needs to be taken seriously. We will come up with a solution if you can stick this out to the end.
Brenda Spencer, a sixteen year old American student shot dead a number of people at Cleveland Elementary School, San Diego in 1979, citing the reason as ‘I don’t like Mondays.’ In typical American craziness, the rifle she used had been given to her by her doting daddy for her 16th birthday. There are a lot of Mondays that presumably Spencer doesn’t like since that infamous day, because she has spent all of them in prison to this day. Bob Geldof made a hit record based on that terrible Monday massacre.
So, can anything be done about this mental Monday mystification? As ever, this column is to the forefront in coming up with an answer. It has been found that the productivity of workers is at its all-time low on Mondays. With people being up to 30 per cent less productive and often only managing to work for 3.5 hours throughout the day. One solution would be to halve the working day on Monday. An even better idea might be to have a bank holiday Monday every week … but why not go the whole hog while we’re at it and get rid of Mondays altogether, if it is doing nothing but harm? The working week could start on Tuesday – a day that gives no bother to anybody. Granted, this makes the week a bit awkward if we are to retain seven days. Having exercised a bit of brain-storming with the Lads, we see the answer in slotting in a nice new easy day between Friday and Saturday. This would be a ‘winding down day’ before the weekend to be called ‘Lá Ėasca.’
Don’t Forget
There are too many people in too many cars in too much of a hurry going too many directions to get nowhere for nothing.
