Damien Galeone

Broken Phone with Carrying Case

The worst day of the week, by far, is Tuesday.

All of the other days have some benefit. On Wednesday we see the all important light at the end of the tunnel. Thursday, or malý Pátek (small Friday) in Czech, is the beginning of the weekend, when drinking becomes socially acceptable.

Friday is the unquestioned king of the weekday world, and people tend to celebrate it by working casually. The unwritten rule of Friday seems to be that no real work gets accomplished; the overwhelming mood of “weekend” billows through the office as people mentally sip a Friday night beer or eat a Saturday morning omelet.

There is no need to outline Saturday’s advantages. And I’ve always thought Sunday was sort of depressing, as my whole week is ahead, but at least I can sleep in and be prone on the couch without too much guilt. Say what you want about Monday, but at least the unpleasantness that was ahead of you on Sunday is now actually getting waded through.

But Tuesday sucks. Nothing good happens on one. And it seems as though the little niggling problems that can come up, do so on a Tuesday. And so it was with this last one. It had already been a hard week technology-wise. On the previous Friday, I dropped my phone on the tram. It fell face down on the metal floor, the unmistakable sound of glass breaking echoing through the vehicle. Everyone on the tram winced along with me, our collective worst nightmares becoming my reality. I picked it up gingerly to find that it had a comet-shaped shatter in its screen, a little slab of glass falling off in cruel mockery.

Since I hate spending money on technology it now sits in a plastic sandwich bag, which PJ has dubbed the Ibag 6. The bag became necessary after the saran wrap became too loose and unruly.

This had come on the heels of another techno-setback the previous Tuesday, when I knocked a drink into my laptop keyboard. And ten minutes after doing that, being an efficient lad and making certain to do as much damage as possible, I did it again. Damn Tuesday.

So going into Tuesday, the worst day of the week, I was using a phone wrapped in plastic because it caused me to bleed, and I was dealing with a laptop whose letter P, plus sign, delete, alt, and up keys no longer worked, and whose keyboard was a constant adventure in lost functions.

Tuesday, sucking as it does, somehow contrived to push me further, by deciding to break my French Press coffee maker. Now there are two things in my flat that I love more than my coffee maker: 1. My cat, and 2. My laptop, and one of those was falling apart.

As much as a Luddite as I pride myself to be, when technology breaks I feel as though I have become a societal outcast, exiled to the fringe of the informational and contact world. My phone and laptop were on the fritz, and now I had to deal with that without coffee. On a Tuesday.

After jerry rigging the coffee maker and gaining some grind-filled use from it, the letter Q on the laptop died. “I kwit!” I typed and removed myself from the office to sit on the couch to read. The cat stood in my lap and sneezed in my face.

Tuesday sucks.