Writers,
During the recent Memorial Day weekend, many hoped for extra writing time, and perhaps some much needed rest, only to have their hopes dashed.
The Expansion Effect
Everyone knows that a short week is always longer than a regular week. This is known as the Expansion Effect or “stretch effect.” If the day/s off come near the end of a week, such as Thanksgiving, it takes about two weeks to get from the Monday before Thanksgiving to Wednesday. Until now, this phenomenon was assumed to be caused by the Anticipation Factor. You were simply excited, causing time to slow. Not so. The time continuum stretched.
Conversely, if you get Monday off for Memorial Day or Labor day, each day of the following four days of the workweek takes about a week to complete. It has been observed that in one instance, it took three days to get from 8 am to 10 am on the first day back.
The Contraction Effect
The Expansion Effect is enhanced by the Compression Effect. A four-day weekend has been known to compress into about a day and a half. The first day is a total loss, with it not seeming like a day off until about 11 AM. The second day is a blur, especially after Thanksgiving. Saturday is the first real vacation day and may be the best chance to actually get some writing done. By Sunday, the compression is acute, and many don’t even remember Sunday once they have returned to work.
Some may have been well aware of this Expansion and Compression of time while others may be thinking, “I knew something was going on!” However, the data I am most interested are the new findings in the Exhaustion Factor.
The Exhaustion Factor
The Exhaustion Factor is the curious phenomenon that makes a person more tired during an expansion, in a fixed and direct ratio to the extra time off. Students of holidays have long expected this was true. The fascinating and somewhat unexpected results seem to point to additional fatigue caused by the stretched short week.
It has long been assumed that the expansion of days after a holiday was caused by fatigue. However, a double-blind study has shown that the week is actually expanding in a time warp. The added fatigue is caused by a misbalance in the biorhythms of those attempting to endure the expansion after a compression.
Biorhythms expert, Clyde Kloon, has likened this phenomenon to a crack the whip game in which the compressed relaxing time followed by an expanded working time causes “the snap.” It is this sudden time speed reversal that causes the added fatigue.
Kloon has shown that more energy is released during that snap than was present in the entire compression-expansion cycle. There is actually a net loss of energy! Kloon suspects this release of energy can cause a minute rise in temperature in a large city. Animals react and it may be that weather is affected.
I can only hope that my findings have helped you understand why you got so little writing done during the recent Memorial Day weekend and why the following four days were so grueling.
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