Working For The Weekend

What's A Weekend?

For those not already in the know, the rock band Loverboy had a popular anthem in the 1980s called “Working For The Weekend”. It was such an innocent time with so much hair spray. Let us not forget these lyrics:

Everybody's working for the weekend,
Everybody wants a new romance,
Everybody's goin' off the deep end,
Everybody needs a second chance,

The most important thing about these lyrics is that they rhyme. Also, it’s the most use of the the word “everybody” since Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”. The truth is that the most common job in the United States is the kind where you have to help customers, so the song should be called “Working On The Weekend”.

Of course, nobody would be working for the weekend if everybody was off work. You couldn’t go to the store, theater, bar, Wild Boar Family Park, or any of the many other fine places you normally go to spend your hard-earned money if the staff at those places were at home and trying to relax. We’re not a completely automated society. Yet.

Working on the weekends never bothered me, and it’s not just because Sunday’s such a drag. It meant that I got days off in the middle of the week when more exciting activities were available, like going to the doctor or a bank. And if something exciting did happen on the weekend, such as going to a Loverboy concert, all it meant is that I would be technically dead at work the next day. As if anyone would notice.

Wait, Loverboy toured a lot. I doubt they only played on weekdays. No, those rascals worked the weekends like they were sacking groceries at Safeway. Those innocent times were packed with deception.

This is an eternal truth when you work with customers. Your shift doesn’t end in the middle of a customer interaction, although it would be very funny if it did.

Another eternal truth. You better be very bored with your daily activities if you want to add more to them without a decent hike in pay.

This customer is, I’m sorry to say, me. If I’m excited about a low price it’s because I’m looking at the wrong price tag. Many people who put up price tags are doing it at the speed of light in the middle of the night, so I should always assume that a price tag is merely a suggestion of which item is placed above it.

I had these one-on-one meetings with my boss before the store opened and I always found them creepy. It was an odd feeling. The store was closed and most of the lights were out. There she was on my monitor, looming close and wanting to talk about something that my brain wasn’t awake enough to fully appreciate. Sometimes I felt like I was living a sad version of the future. I thought it would be more like Star Trek.

This is also me. I was accused of not contributing. I was innocently honest and said that I could rehash things if they wanted, but I think I got it all.

The guy I knew who had perfected the art of rephrasing whatever the boss already said moved up the ladder very quickly. I discovered his trick after several meetings where there was nothing left to add, but he still had something to say. I always wondered if he had a thesaurus opened on another screen, because he was great at it. Life is but a game, my friend.

It’s amazing how clear the air seems and how easy it is to get work done while all of the bigwigs are busy in meetings. If they just stayed in their meetings, productivity could triple.

Not everybody wants to blossom into the position of Master Of The Universe, and that should be very good. I knew a guy who had been with a company for almost thirty years and had no desire to move up the ladder. His biggest challenge was to come up with goals during his yearly reviews.

Take a hard look at your managers before you decide if you want to be one.

Tabby’s working for the weekend.

I think this is what really drives long-term careers for some people. Yes, they could move on to greener pastures, but they really just want to enjoy their lives and their job isn’t the center of their universe.

I’ve never been that fortunate. I get terminally bored after a few years. This comic is officially the longest job that I’ve had.