What room is there for five days of work and two days of weekend? We’re supposed to have at least two lives anyway, balancing work, life, school, and play. For any stage of life, we’re supposed to pick two, but seven divides by nothing but one. Seven days is completely arbitrary, a token of change from one calendar to another. That change in late Rome happened during a time when astronomy was suffering from a hiatus of official interest. It was also a time when six days of non-stop physical labor punctuated by one of devotion to a deadly dull religion was an improvement. Nuts to that.

Should we add a day or subtract one? Should we expand the week to nine to provide a potential to make thirds? That question might hinge most on how long our weekends should be, and how much of the week to work. Three days on and three days off is attractive from the point-of-view of a shift worker. Shift-working might go away, but the equality of week and weekend is what intrigues me. A three-day-weekend is long enough to provide rest without being so long as to ensure forgetfulness. Four days is just too long. Six days, total, still allows for two-day thirds, giving workplaces the ability to work even more schedules together (even four-days on, two-days off) without having to figure out whether to insert or remove that extra, prime-making day.

All of these alternatives mean more free time than we have now. My vote is for six.

So given my desire to contract rather than extend, what’s the most useless day, dedicated to a forgotten entity, that we can get rid of? Wednesday, of course. It’s holy for practically no one and represents nothing but the drudgery of the dead expanse of the middle of the five-day work week. Let’s dump Wednesday.