The day that isn’t
Today doesn’t really exist. An invention of a calendar wizard in long forgotten times, a day that wouldn’t have continued if the French had managed to promulgate their new method for calculating the passage of time after the Revolution, it doesn’t even have a patron saint. When the economic calculations are in, it will be seen to have as little worth as the Daylight Saving Time Act (which is actually a series of provincial legislations.)
Put yourself in the suit of a salaryman. Careful calculations have declared your efforts to be worth a certain number of pre-tax dollars per year (that’s 365 days for the mathematically challenged). A quick finger run on your two dollar solar powered device delivers a per diem amount. Along comes the bisextile year and you work one more day for free.
Or how about the owner of a small company, who also plans the expenses to be incurred for underpaying employees for that same 365 day period (that’s 1 year for the mathematically challenged, since everything has a corollary in the math world). Along comes this extra day and your profit margin takes a hit. In fact, that’s probably why the banks are declaring losses in a year where business is up; the whole subprime mortgage story is just a smokescreen for leap year miscalculation.
What did I see that was out of the ordinary today? Well, a car hit our bus in the first fifteen seconds of the ride home. I’d managed to catch the bus fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but the driver pulled over to do the exchange of insurance info and we all had to climb down and cross a snowy park where we caught the next scheduled run, fifteen minutes later. Like the day, the gain in time didn’t really exist.
Now don’t get me started on the Daylight Saving thing (which is only a few days away). I could go on for an hour on that topic.
