What’s in a Weekend?
The concept of a weekend is ancient, dating back to Biblical times; the idea behind it began as a day of rest for the soul and reflection (ahem, no boozing). It was modernized in 1926 when Henry Ford was the first factory owner to close for both Saturday and Sunday, allowing workers time with family to balance out the grueling five-day work week (or to spend their hard earned money on things like cars, how Machiavellian of him).
Throughout my adult life my relationship with Friday night until Monday morning has always been of the tortured variety. You see, I’ve worked at places like 24-hour cable news networks, and boutique public relations firms whose idea of a weekend off on a regular basis is pretty much non-existent. And for the most part, I was fine with that. At the time, I dealt with on-call situations like, say, a space shuttle blowing up and me spending an entire weekend down in the tapes library looking through archival footage of congressional testimony from the Rodgers Commission to locate the portion where o-ring erosion is described on the record by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, searching for the five-minute portion that isn’t an absolute snooze-fest, as if it were the norm.
