Too Soon?

Typically, when I think of the phrase "too soon," it reminds me of comedy. It comes up in the context of a joke or comment about a recent event (often some kind of tragedy) and whether it's too soon to make a joke about that event. For example, a joke about the Hindenburg on May 7th, 1937 would probably have been too soon, but now it's fair game. Personally I'm not sure there should be any limits in comedy, but that's a story for another day.

Today, I was asking myself whether it was too soon to be so happy about a 3 day weekend. I had multiple months of 7 day weekends while I was out of work. I've only been at this job for two weeks. Shouldn't I have woken up this morning disappointed that today was not another day to show my employers what a great business decision they made by hiring me? Instead, I woke up extremely happy that this week would only include 4 days of 6:30am alarms and had one extra day of no alarm goodness.

After giving it some thought, I say no, it was not too soon. Like many other things, I think the day to day aspects of employmentness, are like riding a bike. After seeing zero need for caffeine for all this time, I've fallen right back into my cup of coffee needed every morning routine (although hopefully this will change once I start my later hours in a couple of weeks). I fall right into the the usual, and generally bland, conversations about weekends (both past and upcoming) like I never left. And, probably most importantly for me, I've already remembered that the certainly un PC comment my friends would have enjoyed (well some of them anyway, I have some PC friends) is probably best left out of the office.

So as I sit here late on Monday night, watching First Blood instead of going to sleep, am I upset that I'm going to work tomorrow? No, I experienced the alternative for way too long to not be happy about having a job to do. Plus, so far I generally like the people that I'm working with, which has not always been the case in the past.

I think I'm going to save my answer to the "How do you like the job so far?" question, one I've been asked about 78,000 times over the last two weeks, for the next post. Until then, watch this SNL digital short. If you don't like it, you've lost cool points.