The weekend – what do you think?

I’m sure I speak for most people when I say that the weekend is probably one of the things that is most looked forward to during the week. It’s usually the two days of the week where one can throw caution to the wind, let your hair down and have some fun after what is usually a long week at work. It is also the time of the week that is earmarked for all those little odd job around the house that need doing such as hanging that picture that’s been lying around for months, mowing the lawn, changing the sheets, washing the dog, ironing the cat and polishing the car (ok, so I don’t do all these things but you get the drift). It is also the time of the week that most people do their grocery shopping and those that feel inclined to also use the weekend to do DIY.

In most of the world this seems to work quite well – people work hard during the week and do all their chores/DIY/partying at the weekend. The weekend usually tends to be too short for everything that people would like to do/need to do, but this is a point that I will come back to later. However, in Austria and Germany, things work a little bit differently.

Take grocery shopping for instance. As much as people would like to, it’s usually impossible to do any grocery shopping during the week. You don’t finish work until about 5 or 5.30pm so by the time you come home and make a list of what you need, the shops are all closed (they usually close as 6pm in the part of the continent). 24hour shopping or even late night shopping here is as common as seeing a talking cow in the pub on a Saturday night (andwe know how common that is!). So, logically, people tend to do their shopping at the weekend. To be more precise, people have to do their shopping on Saturday because (yes you guessed it), the shops are all closed on Sundays! Actually, it tends to be Saturday afternoon because most normal people use Saturday morning to recover from Friday night (they couldn’t go shopping because the shops were closed, but the pub was open ....) Thus, you have the vast majority of the population cramming into the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon trying to buy enough provisions to last them the whole week, which if they didn’t, would mean that they probably would have to starve until the following weekend.

For doing DIY, the story is a little bit worse. As those of you who are that way inclined will know, DIY usually consists of going to a DIY store, buying what you need, coming back home, starting to do your DIY, going back to the DIY store ‘cos you forgot some thing or ran out of something, coming back home etc etc. It’s the way nature intended. If one were a little bit organised, you could usually make sure that you purchased enough DIY provisions on Saturday so that you wouldn’t have to go back on Sunday (of course, this would mean having to buy double your weekly groceries the previous Saturday so that you have the time to make the obligatory 3 or 4 trips to the DIY store on Saturday afternoon). Even if this were possible (which in most cases it isn’t necessarily so), and one worked around having to go to the DIY store on Sundays, there still is a problem – German law prohibits doing certain things on Sundays and DIY is one of them (washing your car on the street is another – in fact, in Germany, I think it’s illegal to wash your car on the street on any day of the week). So the general rule of thumb in Germany and Austria is if you want to do any DIY, you need to plan it at least 3 weeks in advance. In my opinion, this kinda takes away some of the enjoyment of DIY, which comes from the spontaneity of it across most of the rest of the world.

To return to my point about the weekend being too short, I think it really is. I reckon that weekends should be 3 days and the working week should be 4days. I truly believe that people will probably be a lot more productive at work if this were the case. When I worked up in Scotland, we used to work a 9-day fortnight – Monday to Friday one week and Monday to Thursday the next week. I.e. we had every other Friday off. To compensate for this, each of the 9 working days was slightly longer than normal but this was morn than made up for by having three-day weekend every two weeks. It meant that you didn’t have to fight the weekend crowds when shopping, it meant you could actually go into the bank (and see all the lovely people that look after your money) and it also meant that you could have a late night on a Thursday and not have to worry about going to work the next morning.

I think the concept of a 9-day fortnight should be extended and implemented in Germany and Austria to make it an 8day fortnight. Yes, it means that you’ve got to work a little bit longer during the week, but hey, there’s not much else you can do as everything is closed by 6pm. What it does mean is you can do your groceries, DIY and anything else that you need to do and still have enough time to enjoy the weekend – What say you?