I have discovered a new day in the working week and I shall call it “Tuednesday”. Over the past year or so, the day formerly known as “Tuesday” has disappeared from my week, to be taken over by its evil doppelgänger that masquerades as Wednesday from 8am to 10pm. The realisation dawns that “oh shit, tomorrow isn’t Thursday”, at bedtime each Tuednesday and so the prospect of reliving the middle day of the week looms on poor working souls all over again.

Perhaps I ought to make better use of the white board above my desk. Instead of the Jessica Ennis mask telling me “always make room for sausage”, she should tell me what day of the week it is, akin to the noticeboards in hospital elderly care wards. It wouldn’t make any difference though because every Tuednesday, I’d write Wednesday anyway.

What a terrible prospect for the rest of my working life. I could always change my working hours and compress them over 4 days so that I didn’t have to work on the second day of the week, but what if I then thought Mondays were Fridays and forgot to come in for the rest of the week?

Or maybe I could get out of working all together and claim disability benefits for my bizarre mental disorder.

“So, Miss, you claim that you can’t work because you’re scared of Tuesdays?”

“But you don’t get it, Tuesdays don’t exist anymore! How can I be expected to work when one of the days has been substituted for its evil twin?”

“Do you really think that the rest of us even know what month it is? It’s just another four weeks towards retirement.”

“Yes, but I’m having to work double Wednesdays, and one of those is evil, so that means that retirement is much further away.”

“I don’t follow your logic. Why can’t you just not worry about what day it is and just get on with it? On the day that people leave the office and say ‘have a nice weekend, see you Monday’, take two days off and then come back in.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re forgetting the Sunday paradox!”

“Which is???”

“Sundays go much more quickly than any other day of the week, but it’s different for everyone. Some people get a four hour Sunday, others get the full twenty four, but it’s always in flux, depending on a number of unquantifiable and unidentified factors. So bearing in mind that everybody’s Sunday lasts a different length of time, Mondays never start at the same point for everybody and it throws the entire working week out.”

“Have you ever considered a career where time is arbitrary, such as in customer services? There, you can call somebody up for some feedback or be dealing with a query, tell them it won’t take a minute, but keep them on the line for at least thirty. Genius, really. Even Einstein couldn’t bend time like that.”

“Will they let me take my dog? I’ll tell them he only needs to be there for a minute.”

Break
After much postulating, I have booked a week off work for the beginning of March. I’m hoping for decent weather so that I can replant my patch and tidy up the house. I also want to do some more in depth research into the Sunday paradox to ascertain whether factors such as annual leave have an effect on the time allocation. Needless to say, I shall also be testing the hypothesis that alcohol can have a profound effect on the [time]free/[time]wasted quotient. I shall publish the results of my research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Stoneclough, become a world famous superstar and never have to worry about Tuednesday ever again.