Rush hour traffic, an overflowing inbox and the working week ahead. Yes, it’s Monday again.
But did you know, you might hate Monday because of a PR stunt?
‘Blue Monday’ was a name given to a date in January to be the most depressing day of the year – and it was all part of a publicity campaign. It was included in a press release by the public relations agency appointed by Sky Travel.
My colleague, Alex Dobocan, said: “Blue Monday came about as a PR stunt but it seems to have had success and made us all regard Mondays as… well, depressing.
“Whilst we all dread endings and we could agree they are never all that pleasant, when it comes to ending a week we are more excited than anything! So why are we not treating Monday as any other start? - An exciting time to make things happen, to plan and to conquer.”
Taking this positive attitude, and inspired by a paragraph on Tumblr, I’d like to tell you a little more about these Mondays that we love to hate.
Today, almost 2,000 babies will be born in the UK – that’s 80 every hour or one every 40 seconds – and in Scotland alone there’ll be more than 80 weddings. In fact, it’s Tuesday that’s the least popular day of the week to tie the knot for us Brits.
According to the UK Tea Council, we’ll drink about 165 million cups of tea – that’s 60.2 billion each year. The British drink more tea than any other nationality. We’ll also consume 70 million cups of coffee today and, across the country, we’ll eat 47 Kit Kats every second. That all sounds good to me.
Just like any other day, more languages will be spoken in London than in any other city in the world, Facebook’s ‘Like’ button will be clicked approximately 4.5 billion times today and the word ‘love’ has been tweeted hundreds of times since you started reading this sentence.
Two new members will join LinkedIn every second, there’ll be more than two billion Google searches typed in around the globe and about half of Facebook’s 800 million active users will log in over the course of the day.
We’ll find that it may be Monday, but it’s not mundane. And it’s actually an estimated 19 million people’s birthday today.
So if you’re dreading your Monday, the first day of the working week, it just might not be so bad after all.