Monday Morning Sickness

artwork by amina

One Sunday a few weeks back I was at a party where I heard that author Salman Rushdie had offended some students, particularly those from India, with a speech he gave at Tufts University. He had apparently made a reference to the fact that while the number of deities in the various religions in India was fixed, the population has been growing since ancient times, thus causing an imbalance. According to Ashfaq, a faculty member of the Tufts School of Medicine, who attended the Rushdie meeting, some of the students and teachers got up and left in protest. As I was listening to Ashfaq's account of the Tufts event, I felt sorry that I had passed up the opportunity to hear and meet Rushdie in person. I recall receiving an email from my daughter, who is a Tufts alumna, and who, in deference to my admiration for Rushdie, had not only forwarded the announcement from Tufts, but had asked me if I would be interested to go. As alum, she was entitled to a ticket, which she was willing to give up for me. I had declined the offer because the Tufts University campus was an hour's drive from my house, and the event took place on a Sunday afternoon and it would have been followed by a reception. If I had gone to the speech and the subsequent reception, I was afraid that I wouldn't have been able to get back home before midnight and thereby suffer the inevitable consequences of such misadventures, the dreaded Monday Morning Sickness, as we call it.

Monday Morning Sickness (MMS), for those who are not familiar with the concept, according to Webster's Online Dictionary, refers to those 'ailments' that occur when an individual gets back to work after one or two days of rest. However, comedians and the cable TV channel Comedy Central have now expanded the definition to include the following human conditions:
a. any discomfort, such as hangovers or sheer laziness, that makes one feel like not going to work on Monday morning, and
b. general absenteeism and or tardiness that one notices in the workplace every Monday morning.
In a country like USA, where many workers have to punch in a timecard or report their arrival time on timesheets, MMS does not go unnoticed, even if sometimes overlooked by bosses, when workers show up late on Monday morning.
Cynics might doubt that MMS is a serious issue, but statistics don't lie! It is estimated that in the USA approximately 50 percent of the workforce reported suffering from MMS every year, and in any given week, between 10 percent and 20percent of the workers either call in sick Monday morning or show up late for work. In fact, to deter MMS, some offices have a policy to the effect that Monday morning sick calls count as vacation days. If you call in sick on Monday morning, you pay for it: it is deducted from your vacation time.

Now coming back to my own personal travails, the morning after the afore-mentioned party, I started suffering from MMS. No, I did not overstay at the party, which really was a cookout, since it fizzled out after dusk. We came back home on time, but with all the food that I had ingested at this party - thanks to the wonderful barbeque skills of Shah, a physician by profession, but also self-proclaimed 'world's best tandoori chicken chef.' I sat down on the couch in front of the TV weighed down by the multiple servings of grilled chicken being digested in my belly and started watching the final game of the NBA between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Orlando Magic. That's where my trouble started. Before long, I realized that the game had gone past midnight Eastern Time. I sometimes wonder how unfair it is for West Coast events to go past the bedtime for hard-working East Coast souls like me. Basketball games on TV, which usually start at 7:45 PM to coincide with prime viewing time, allow the game to end before the nightly news at 11:00. However, when these games are played in a West Coast locale, the time difference causes havoc on the East Coast. Monday Morning Sickness reaches an epidemic level on the Monday following Super Bowl if the game is played on the West Coast. I sometimes wonder why the early settlers in the US had to go beyond the Mississippi River, when there was so much land on the east side. Some have speculated that Pakistan broke up because the Bengalis got fed up with West Pakistani domination of the airwaves on late night TV shows.

Coming back to Rushdie, I was reading a short story by him in a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine. In the short story, "In the South", Rushdie gives us a tour of the life of two elderly men and how they pass life, as they are "waiting to die," in the words of one of the octogenarian. As I read through the account of these two geriatric persons I started reflecting on my own future, particularly after retirement, as age creeps up on me gradually. Only last year, I was thinking that I might be able to retire at 62, or in the worst-case scenario, at 65. That would allow me 10 to 15 years to travel around the globe and see places I have not been to, particularly in the Southern part of Africa, before senility lays its irrefutable claim to my mind and body. I figured that Social Security checks from the government and my own savings in 401(K) accounts would given I and my wife a decent lifestyle, and if I could combine that with a mixed regime of six months of stay in the USA and six months in Bangladesh, I could lead a comfortable life without going on dole or depending on the charity of my children.

Now all these dreams have gone up in smoke. From what I hear, the baby boomers like us can look forward to working and toiling until we are 70. When I saw these projections, I felt like calling up the authors of these projections, uncaring economists who are bent on extracting the last drop of blood from septuagenarians, and give them a piece of my mind. However, when I shared my indignation with my wife and told her of my plans to call the economist and tell him how faulty his model is and heartless his projections are, she calmly said, "Ok, take it easy! Who is asking you to work until 70? All you have to do is retire when you are ready and move to Bangladesh, and I am sure we'll be able to live comfortably on our savings and government checks."

I could not believe that she said that. She knows that I am addicted to watching my favorite shows on TV every evening: 60 Minutes on Sunday, Monday Night Football on NBC, The Mega Millions lottery draw on Tuesday night, and so on. How does she think I am going to survive in Bangladesh without these shows? I just could not tell her that's the reason why I hate to move to Bangladesh. Instead, I threw her a curve ball: What if the exchange rate goes the other way? Not being adept at the fuzzy logic of economists, she finally saw my point and conceded that moving back to Bangladesh, with volatility in the exchange rate and a banking system that might collapse again, would mean that we have to stuff all our savings in $100 bills in big suitcases, and lie about it at the airports. Yes, that would be too risky a move, she accepted.

On this Monday morning, I finally managed to get up, and went to the store where I spend every morning drinking coffee and chatting with customers. Murray, a 74-year divorcee, stops by every morning on his way to work, and gets his usual dose of newspaper, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. As is his practice on Monday mornings, he started off with his list of complaints about his ex-wife, whom he pays alimony, and his lack of success at instant lottery games. I do not know what he did in his earlier life, but now he appears to have a recession-proof job at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, a Massachusetts State Department. He seems to have a pretty carefree life, except on Monday mornings. He lives with a very young women, who is the reason his wife of 35 years left him. We chatted for a few minutes, before he said, "Got to go to my job… can't be late today!"

By that time, my sickness was gone and soon I was behind my desk, banging away on the keyboard of my computer.

Abdullah Shibli lives and works in Boston.