Monday Smiles – 3/17/2014
Mondays have a terrible reputation … just Google hate Mondays then click on images and you’ll see. But chances are, you already know that from personal experience.
And Monday mornings, as the nexus between the freedom of the weekend and the responsibilities of the workplace, are even more hated. According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, More than half of us will spend the day complaining, particularly in the morning and One in three people said they hated Monday more than any other day of the week. Some of the most common reasons include dreading the working week ahead, over-indulging over the weekend or having a mountain of emails to catch up with. I’ve been lucky, I suppose. I’ve never been much of an over-indulger and I’ve always had a job that I enjoyed. Not every minute, mind you. My business, engineering, is, like many others, frequently populated with too-short schedules and ridiculous deadlines that require periods of intense work, often evenings and weekends. Writing proposals has always been one of the most intense and, because I’m very good at it, I’ve always been at the center of the maelstrom. The truth is, though, once the damn things are out the door, I look back at a well-written proposal with pride, especially if it brings in some work.
Get to the point, Older Eyes, get to the point. The point is, even at sixty-nine I’m still writing proposals and they can still make me nuts, at least until they begin to come together and the pride of authorship shows up. This past weekend was a working weekend, trying to get a proposal that is due next week done. I was in the frantic, grumpy, frustrated phase of the process. But yesterday was a very good day … I got a draft of the proposal out to my
colleagues and now we can enter the stage of the process we sometimes call polishing the turd because we’re so close to it that nothing appears right. But often, the turd turns out not to be a turd at all, it turns out to be a winner. So even though it’s Monday … Monday morning, even … it feels kinda like the weekend to me. So, I’m smiling … and polishing away.
Have a good week.
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Older Eyes 
March 17, 2014 at 7:19 pm
It’s been so many years now that I worked at a “regular” kind of job that I don’t really remember being a Monday hater but I do remember very well loving Fridays and especially 5 p.m. (Unless the job I had then was perhaps swamped under with lots of work requiring a whole lot of overtime, that is. But even then, I always enjoyed the challenge of getting something completed in time to meet whatever deadlines existed. Today -my deadlines come every other Wednesday as I try to get my order pulled together and submitted to lovely Avon so I would then have 2 free days (usually) to myself and not worrying about my product sales then!
March 18, 2014 at 4:05 pm
Since I’ve been with my company, over nine years now, the business has changed and so has the type of work that I do. But in that time, I’ve rarely dreaded Mondays. Guess I’m pretty lucky to enjoy what I do and the people with whom I work. But there was a time when I understood hating Mondays.
Glad to hear that you got through the hardest part of the proposal and can relax a bit again.