Back in the days when I labored in the sweat-kitchens of the business world, I almost always had to handle more work than I could comfortably digest. I’d arrive home late, fix myself a quick bachelor-supper and crash on my sofa for a few hours while my brain slowly unclenched itself. If I was still awake at the end of the unclenching process, I’d go out for a walk. I’d do the dishes tomorrow. Cleaning out the refrigerator could wait until next month or whenever the leftover lemons became mummified -- whichever came first. That book I planned to write could wait even longer, though I'd want to start it before I became mummified myself. 

I knew there wasn’t enough time in the day to accomplish everything I needed to accomplish. But unlike a lot of my time-squeezed peers, I never wished for a longer day. Twenty-four hours seemed to be more than enough for me, and I eagerly bedded down at the end of the daily cycle. 

It’s not as if we can do anything about the length of our day, anyway. We’re stuck on a planet that plays hide-and-seek with the sun on an endless twenty-four hour repeating loop. If we arbitrarily expanded the day to, say, twenty-seven hours, we’d have to acclimate ourselves to midnight sun and noontime dusks on a staggered schedule that would befuddle the best of us. We should count our blessings that we don’t live on Venus, where it takes the equivalent of 117 earth-days to go from midnight to midnight. Can you imagine how much infernal busywork your boss would expect you to accomplish before sunset? If you worked one-third of the Venusian day, you’d be putting in roughly 940 hours at a stretch -- and good luck bargaining for extra coffee breaks. Living on Jupiter would take it to the other extreme. That obese planet requires less than ten hours to complete one rotation on its axis. You’d probably have to get by on two hours of sleep, and you could forget about taking lunch. Naturally, your boss would still expect eight hours’ worth of daily production out of you. 

No, our traditional twenty-four hour day isn’t the problem. The problem is the seven-day week.

In the year-and-a-half that I’ve been writing a weekly column, I’ve become acutely aware of the week as an omnipresent, unyielding unit of time. You’d think it would be a cushy job, cranking your brain every seven days to grind out another thousand words of intellectual sausage. But now that I’m married and the proud owner of a century-old home, I have other responsibilities to handle... more plates to keep spinning on poles before they crash to the floor and alarm the cat. You’d be amazed at how frighteningly fast a week can flutter by... how little time there is to think amusing thoughts when you're plunging a clogged toilet.

As for those of you who work a torturous five-day-a-week job AND own a home AND have a spouse PLUS kids to keep well-fed and humored -- not to mention tending to your own short-term survival needs through diet, exercise, meditation and an occasional shopping binge, plus the demands of your garden, your pets, your e-mail, your relatives and in-laws, your recreational reading and your roof gutters -- surely you’ve concluded by now that the seven-day merry-go-round is a sorry farce. It doesn’t grant you nearly enough time for a salubrious and well-ordered life. You submit to having your nerves fricasseed five days a week, then you’re granted two days to recover. But what a great cosmic joke! The weekend turns out to be even more grueling than the work-week, as you race to check off all those niggling little items on your to-do list that you would have been checking off all week if you hadn’t been so confoundedly exhausted. 

No, the seven-day slugfest we call a week has been tried and found severely wanting. We clearly need to extend the week by a day, even two. That way the weary worker would gain some desperately needed time to recover from the ravages of the work-week, tackle those maddeningly insistent household chores (like disposing of mummified lemons) and set aside perhaps half a day for actual recreation. Yes, a nine-day week would fill the bill nicely. Employers could still squeeze a full five days out of their hired help, but everyone would return to the office vibrant and ruddy-faced on Monday following the four-day weekend.

The seven-day week as we know it corresponds to nothing in the natural or celestial world. Unlike the day, the month or the year, it isn't based on the ancient movements of the earth, moon or sun. The only reason we use it is that, according to the Book of Genesis, the Good Lord labored six days to create the world and rested on the seventh. That's fine for a supreme deity. But how many of us flimsy earthlings possess the creative power, omniscience, drive or stamina of the Almighty? We’re comparing apples and ambrosia here. If divine Providence needed a full day to kick back and rest His weary sinews after a week’s work, then how much more time do we perishable humans need to recharge our drained batteries? 

Granted, we've made a little paltry progress since the days of Genesis. Somewhere between the Industrial Revolution and the age of the assembly line, enlightened employers acknowledged (or were forced to acknowledge) that we needed a two-day weekend. So they grudgingly cut the work-week back from six days to five. I’m not advocating any further cuts, you understand... I’m simply calling for an extension of the weekend from two days to four. The nine-day week is friendly to work and workers alike.

What would we call the two new days? Here are a few possibilities: Homeday, Funday, Saneday, Playday, Snoozeday, Slackerday, Catchupday. If you prefer, we could continue the ancient tradition of naming days after defunct gods or heavenly bodies, or both (though we might want to stay away from Uranusday). We could try names that would please Dr. Seuss, like Sneetchday or Snozzleday. But the important thing is not how we name them, but that we create them. 

The nine-day week: you heard it here first. Write your Congressman today! (Don't wait until Snozzleday.) And please don’t spoil the fun by mentioning that a nine-day week would trim fifty-odd days off the work year. We wouldn’t want the bosses to find out.