Monday, Monday

Monday always seems determined to shock my system.

The alarm goes off in the morning and I’m all like, Nooooooo, how did THAT get turned back on? It’s only SUNDAY!!…oh…wait…

Every other morning of the week, I spend the first 30-60 minutes on sifting through overnight emails, reviewing job dashboards and running diagnostic queries to make sure all is groovy with our applications, and researching anything weird that pops up from All That.

Mondays, though…geez. Sometimes it’s almost 10:00 (<= 4 to 4-1/2 hours after I’ve logged in) before I finally put All That to bed and get back to my current work tasks.

There’s always a Certain Pile of emails from people who insist on working over the weekend (95% of these will be “weird things” they saw because they were “validating” something while its process was still running, of course it looked “weird,” it was only half-baked when you were lookin’ at it) (but, you can never assume that, because there’s that other 5% of the time when it was actually something going horribly awry on us…ugh…!).

Plus, the applications had two whole days without my hairy eyeball resting sternly upon them, sooooo, they do have a tendency to get up to all kinds of mischief while I wasn’t looking.

And then, there’s the early release thing for the Denizens. Every Monday. Almost two hours earlier than every other day.

For me, it translates to a half-hour earlier log-out time from work…but somehow, it always feels like it is, like, four hours earlier. It always arrives the same way the morning alarm does, setting off a loud wail of, “Whaaaaaaat? But, it’s way too earllllllyyyyyyyy…!”

Ironically, my coworkers do not share this sensation. There are about four of them who will faithfully ping me every Monday at 4:32 p.m. team-time to say, “Oy. aren’t you supposed to be picking somebody up at school right about now?”…usually quickly following up with “…like maybe your son?”

Smart alecks, the lot of them.

But then, they also got the picture I sent them once of Captain Adventure giving me an incredibly disgusted look as he climbed into the van because I was late, mom, LATE.

But even weirder is the way that somehow, bedtime also always seems to arrive well before I’m, you know, ready on Mondays. I still have things I meant to do. Posts to read. Things to order or research. And I always think it’s only, you know, maybe 8:00-ish, but actually, it’s 10:30 and I really need to be off to bed.

And then my phone goes off, shrilly informing me that it is time to wrap it up, woman, you don’t want to end up a zombie AGAIN tomorrow, right?

Whaaaaaaaat? no, it’s too early, it’s only…oh…crap, is that really the time…?!

Mondays, man.

They’re brutal.