Austin hated Sundays. He hated their liminal stillness, their uncertainties, their anticlimactic endings to the interminable work week. But most of all, he hated that Sundays gave way to Mondays. And Mondays marked another week of all this.

Mondays were dreadful. They were nausea-ridden eight-hour crawls through desert purgatory with no oasis on the horizon. Everyone smiled plastic smiles and asked, performatively, how was your weekend, and gave unsolicited updates on their private lives. But Mondays could be worse. They could be Tuesdays.

Tuesdays were when the real work started. The thought process of the higher-ups was likely that, by Tuesday, you should have your shit together. We’ll give you Monday. But Tuesday, you come in ready to really work. And seemingly everyone—everyone except Austin—lapped that sour Kool-Aid right from their palms. Weaklings, Austin would think.

He had tried in earnest to educate them. To wake them from their stupor. He would often remind his colleagues that they toiled under the steel-toed corporate boot and were pumped with propaganda like obese poultry to be eventually slaughtered. A long, languid death. But they only seemed concerned with the pumping of the water cooler. It was sad, really. How they lacked class-consciousness.

Wednesdays were miserable, too, but in a different way. They presented a “reassuring” hey guys good job just a few more days. We’re halfway there! Yeah, right. Halfway to the “end.” The end of what? Maybe this week, but not next week, or the week after that. Never a real end in sight.

Thursdays were practically a continuation of Wednesdays. Almost there. So close to the weekend. Any weekend plans? and the etc. bullshit. It was another day that Austin would put his head down and give 60 to 70 percent of his effort to whatever meaningless project was at hand. He did, after all, need to eat.

Fridays were embarrassing. Everyone acted like animals who got an extra banana mashed up in their slop for being good. To make it worse, almost all of them, after finally freeing themselves of the 40-hour anchor, would jaunt over to the local bar and continue to poison themselves through the night. And they would invite their oppressors along, too! He couldn’t fathom it, how they could be so blind.

And Saturdays, of course, nothing happened. Everyone would go home and stare at the walls of their other prisons. Austin often wondered why they did not meet on their days off, perhaps grab a coffee and bagel and discuss the structures of their oppression. Lay down a blueprint for revolution. Instead, he found himself rereading the necessary literature and continuing to write his never-ending manifesto.

Poor Austin, his coworkers often thought and murmured to each other. He really needs to get laid.