Undiscussing Weekends on Monday Mornings

Like many of you out there, I am not a big fan of Monday mornings. And one of the things I dread on a Monday morning is the time when I come to work and my fellow workers start greeting me with the question, 'So, how did the weekend go?' So far till date, with the exception of 3-4 (make that 2-3) weekends a year, I never had had a weekend I could talk or write home about. So for some time, as an evasive tactic, I made it a habit to treat this as a rhetorical question and used to reply with my own rhetorical question, 'Good. How was yours?' Unfortunately, for most of them out there, it is not a rhetorical counter-question to a rhetorical question. Hence they get into this long description of how well their well-planned weekend went. And then there are others who moan and groan about how their well-planned weekend went awry and they had to spend that time in a very unplanned manner. Not that I have anything against such answers, but listening to them makes me think that my entire weekend, whether planned or unplanned, was an epic waste of time. 

So of late, I have started to utilize my Monday mornings for planning for the weekend ahead. I painstakingly collect all the 'how my weekend was/was not well-spent' information from my co-workers and pick the best plans (best-of-breed in software parlance) and use that the following Monday with certain subtle changes to the script, of course. Yup, not very original but it helps to have a well-scripted weekend. This way, whenever someone asks me the dreaded question, I go into this well-rehearsed prosy monologue that acts as an instant and total buzz-kill. And so when I courteously ask how theirs' went (after I'm done with my prosy buzz-kill of a monologue), they shrug it off with a mumbled 'Good.' and quietly slip away. Good. I have also begun to notice that slowly but surely more and more people have stopped asking me about my weekends and make do with a simple 'Hi' or wave from afar and walk off in a different direction as if they just remembered something important. And because of that, I have been able to appreciate my precious weekends better than before. Because for me, a weekend not discussed or compared on the following Monday morning is a weekend well-spent.

TGIF!