Case of the Mondays

It's Monday. And from my understanding, Mondays are universally the most disliked day of the workweek. Your weekend of freedom is over, time to get back to the grind.

Now imagine this. You arrive at the office to discover a trench dug right in front of the threshold. You go to your desk and find out that the network is down, meaning no email, no Internet, no remote drives. There's no way you can get any work done. The network isn't due to come up until the following day. However, you're one of the lucky ones -- some workstations don't even have power. But there is still electricity, which means that you still have lights. Your boss thinks this is the perfect opportunity to clean up. The end result of that is five garbage bags of shredded paper, and there's still more to do.

After lunch, nothing has changed. Coworkers start disappearing. Lunches, meetings, promotion ceremonies. A contracted laborer comes into the office and announces that the power is going to go out for about thirty minutes. You call your supervisor, who is oblivious to everything that's going on and instructs you to call your boss. Just as you get the boss on the phone, you watch your last coworker in the office walk out the door. Your instructions? Stay put. Don't leave. Open a door for some light.

It is 115 degrees outside. There is no power, there is no air conditioning. Opening the door lets in the sun, which brings in the heat. Everyone else has taken off. You are sitting alone in a dark office. A dark hot office. And you know that the guy that outranks you just walked out of the door without so much as checking in with the boss.

How's that for a case of the Mondays?

I have a feeling that this is going to be a very long thirty minutes.