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Sunday, November 7, 2010

Tell me why I don’t like ..... Sundays

Quite apart from allowing a rather lame pop cultural reference to an old Boomtown Rats song, one of the main issues that encountered in working in the desert is that Sunday is a working day (Friday and Saturday are the formal weekend days here – with Friday being the equivalent of Sunday elsewhere in the world with most people taking a day off work, spending time with their families, going to Mosque/Church etc.). So while your weekend starts earlier, it ends earlier and while friends and family elsewhere in the world are contemplating their Sunday roast, noses here are firmly back on the grindstone. For me I am sure it is a cultural thing – having spend the vast majority of my preceding years associating Sunday’s with the “day of rest” – to go to church , play football/cricket, do homework (School years) steel myself for work (post-school years) and generally take stock of life, it has proved quite difficult to come to terms with the early morning alarm on a Sunday summoning me to work. Since Friday is Sunday this means that Saturday is a bit of a hotch potch. In HK, Saturday was a day for relaxing and, in the evening, going down to the Main Street for the footy. I still try to get down to the footy (although the Red Lion has replaced Main Street) but I always have to be aware that it is in effect a school night (although because of the change in time difference – HK 8 hours ahead, UAE 4 hours ahead of GMT – the sport does tend to finish rather earlier). The other advantage is that Sundays at work are usually free of email interference from the other offices (although this also means that Friday’s can be overtaken by queries and questions from colleagues elsewhere in the World). I am not sure that I will ever truly get used to the idea of working on a Sunday although hopefully I will make a better job of it than a contact working here who told me that whenever he arranged meetings or deadlines for “the beginning of next week” he subconsciously assumed that this would be Monday – not good.

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