Embracing Monday Mornings

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

The first thing I saw Monday morning was a giant water bug in the kitchen sink. My cat was circling my feet, begging for another helping of breakfast, and I was on my way to give it to him. Like Ricky Gervais said, you can’t spoil a cat.

Normally, a giant, roach-adjacent insect would have sent my heart a-pitter-pattering at the very least. Instead, I failed to even blink, nudged the giant bug down the drain with a heavy stream of hot water, and ruthlessly killed it via the garbage disposal. Then I washed my hands, even though I hadn’t touched the bug, and gave my cat another helping of chicken-turkey pâté.

What a shit way to start a Monday, I thought to myself. Which is of course, a very stupid thing to think. Monday is just another day, after all. Except we’ve made Monday bad by collectively thinking that it’s bad, and by our collective understanding that most of us go to work on Monday morning, and through the collective experience that work is usually boring, unfulfilling, anxiety-inducing, or not quite worth the proverbial squeeze.

The only time I’ve ever hated Monday was when I was working a job that I hated, in which I was made to feel incompetent because that’s how people who are incompetent make their subsidiaries feel. I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m going to project my insecurities onto you, kind of thing. My boss at this job-that-I-hated actually had no experience doing the thing we were doing, and so sat with me and read through my emails one by one, blaming our lack of sales on the order of my sentences rather than on the useless, expensive piece of software we were trying to sling.

In that job, like in many tech jobs, we had a daily 15 minute “stand up” meeting, where we each sat dead-eyed and talked about what we were working on, instead of actually working. The meetings were at noon, and some days, all I had done by noon was call 30 people who didn’t want to buy our software and who probably didn’t need it. “Shouldn’t I be qualifying these leads?” I said one day to my boss. “You just need to be calling,” she said. “This is all about volume.” It doesn’t take a Harvard-educated nuclear engineer to figure out that any volume of bad leads does not simply, by some miracle, turn good through a nice phone call.