Wednesday: The Day That Has To Justify Itself
Monday does not need memes. Monday has a reputation and everybody respects it. Friday does not need memes either, because Friday is its own reward and nobody has to be talked into it.
Wednesday needs memes. Wednesday needs a whole campaign.
It is, as I write this, genuinely Wednesday, which makes this either excellent timing or a cry for help.
The thesis, posted in pastel
Somebody has already summarised the entire situation, and they did it in the visual register of an inspirational quote.
"Still not Friday, but at least it's not Monday."
Look at the bottom. It says Unknown. Somebody laid this out in a pastel template, put a smiling milkshake next to it, and then attributed it to an anonymous sage, as though it were Marcus Aurelius rather than the single most obvious sentence available about the third day of the week.
That is Wednesday in one image. A day so devoid of character that the best thing anybody can say about it has to be dressed up as ancient wisdom.
Which is bleakly funny, because Wednesday used to have an enormous amount of character. The name comes from Old English Wodnesdaeg, the day of Woden, better known now as Odin: god of war, wisdom, poetry and the dead. The Romance languages went a different route and named it after Mercury, which is how Spanish gets miercoles and French gets mercredi.
So this day was once dedicated either to the one-eyed ruler of the Norse gods or to the messenger of the entire Roman pantheon, and we have collectively reduced it to a whiteboard whose fourth item is "survive". Odin gave up an eye for knowledge. You gave up yours to a spreadsheet.
Camp one: aggressive cheerfulness
The first response to a day with no personality is to manufacture one, loudly, at eight in the morning.
The goat at the top of this page is the purest example. Sunglasses, tree stump, "HAPPY WEDNESDAY Y'ALL". No further argument offered. But the genre is deep.
This is your aunt. This is a coworker who posts in the team channel before anybody has finished a coffee. There is no irony anywhere in it, which is precisely what makes it unsettling.
And then the escalation, which is somebody instructing you to enjoy it.
"I want you to have a happy Wednesday." That is not encouragement, that is a directive from a man who will be checking. Nobody has ever pointed at you like that about a Saturday. Saturday does not require enforcement.
Camp two: open despair
Then there is everybody else, who have given up on the bit entirely.
"Not being dramatic, but it's only Wednesday." The comedy is in the denial. Somebody lying face down on the floor of their own house, insisting they are being proportionate about it.
And the one that hurts, because somebody actually took this photograph at their actual desk.
Everything in this frame is doing work. The hair. The mug that says ANOTHER DAY. ANOTHER EMAIL. But the whiteboard is the masterpiece, because the list starts as an ordinary set of tasks, Meetings, Reports, Emails, and then the fourth item is Survive. Somebody wrote three real things and then quietly changed genre.
Camp three: the arithmetic
The most Wednesday behaviour of all is trying to argue your way out of it.
"Today is Wednesday, which means tomorrow is pre Friday, which means the next day is Friday, so it's basically Friday."
The reasoning is completely unsound and the casting is perfect. This is the man television uses to explain that the pyramids were built by visitors, and here he is inventing a fourth weekday to make himself feel better. By this logic every day is basically Friday, which is either despair or enlightenment.
It is the same instinct behind hump day, the other great Wednesday coping mechanism: reframe the day as a summit you have crested rather than a flat stretch you are still walking across. A camel said it in a car insurance advert once and the entire English-speaking internet adopted it permanently.
The specific complaints
Underneath the two camps sits the real material, which is that Wednesday is when the week's admin catches up with you.
This one is structurally true and not just a joke. Monday is protected because people are catching up, Friday is protected because nobody trusts a Friday decision, so every recurring meeting in the calendar drifts to the middle and stays there. Wednesday is where meetings go to breed.
And for anyone who has simply run out of social capacity by midweek, there is a cat that has said it better than any of us could.
Three days. That is the budget. Whatever tolerance was issued on Monday morning is gone by Wednesday lunch, and the remaining two days run on credit.
The one that knows what it is doing
Which brings us to the most honest meme in the folder.
"Surviving work on Wednesday, one meme at a time." A meme about looking at memes to get through the day you are currently looking at memes to get through. The snake has found its own tail and is fine about it.
If you are reading this article on a Wednesday, at work, this is a photograph of you.
A quiz for people who have checked the date twice
Everyone claims they are fine. Everyone has also looked at the corner of their screen more than once today to confirm what day it is, hoping to be wrong.
A NoodleStrike quiz looks like a normal yes or no quiz, except one button per question will not let itself be clicked. It slides away from the cursor, ignores the first couple of taps, or trades places with the other button at the moment of commitment. You decide the outcome before you send the link. They just have to arrive at it the slow way.
Title it "Is it Friday yet?" and run these five. The bracket is the button that still works.
- "Have you already said 'is it only Wednesday?' out loud today?" (Yes) They have. Possibly twice. Open with the one they cannot honestly deny.
- "Is Wednesday basically Friday?" (Yes) Force them to sign up to the Ancient Aliens reasoning. They will feel it happening.
- "Be honest, are you doing this instead of working?" (Yes) Aimed straight at them, while they sit at a desk. This is the one that gets screenshotted into the team chat.
- "Did you have a meeting today that could have been an email?" (Yes) The most reliable yes in the entire format.
- "Is it Friday?" (No) The closer, and the only cruel one. They will attack that Yes button with real feeling, and it will not move, because it is not Friday. It is Wednesday. The quiz and reality agree at last.
Narrate it with Luigi, who is the workplace pick for exactly this. Run it as bored, confused, tired, unable-to-understand and then crying, and his face descends through the week while the questions stay perfectly polite.
If you want somebody louder about it, Hairy Bones has twenty one moods including pajamas-tired, thinking and a full collapse into sad, which covers the same arc with considerably less dignity.
For the result card: "Confirmed: it is Wednesday. It will be Wednesday for some time."
Every quiz example plays right on the page, and how it works takes each trick apart.
Build one and send it to whoever in the group chat has complained about the week most this morning.