I Hate Mondays

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**I Hate Mondays** is the 64th episode of ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

## Original description

This is Sam, and he hates Mondays. Who doesn’t, you ask? Well, you’re right, everyone does. But sometimes he thinks that he’s cursed, because all the negative things that are supposed to happen to him during the week happen to him on Mondays. All together at the same time.

First of all, Sam encounters a problem that everyone is familiar with, which is the start of a new school week. And he still hasn’t got enough rest from the previous one! His problem is that on Mondays he has lessons in all the subjects that he struggles with. Physics, math, science, and of course, physical education. The thing is that Sam’s a little overweight, and pretty clumsy. His humiliation starts in the locker room, where it seems that everyone laughs at him when he gets changed. And then he always finishes last in all the sport activities they do! You should seem him climbing a rope. His personal record is 5 feet which is…Well, pathetic. And again everyone laughs at him.

So you can understand why he wakes up on Monday already feeling depressed and praying that he got sick during the night. This has happened to him only twice in his life, and he still remembers those Mondays when it happened as the happiest days of his life. The epic fail is postponed, hurray! Unfortunately, that was years ago. So he gets up, and because he’s already trembling at the thought of the usual Monday school humiliation, and because he’s also clumsy, he starts screwing up every single step he takes. He might spill his glass of juice all over his shirt at breakfast and have to change it, and for that reason he’ll be late for school, and when he eventually makes it out the house and he’s already some distance from his home, he might realize that he’s forgotten his school bag.

Or maybe some other bad things will occur – like, when he’s late and running towards school and then he twists his ankle, which is painful but not enough to skip PE. And so his PE class passes even worse than usual, even if that seems impossible. During the day he might do other stupid and clumsy things that make everyone laugh at him. He then feels embarrassed and screws up even more. It’s the vicious circle of Sam’s Monday, and he has never managed to get out of it. But if you were assuming that when he gets home from school the fiasco comes to an end, you’d be wrong. At home he has two parents who are both very eager to educate him.

Don’t think that he doesn’t love his parents. They’re very nice and enthusiastic. Well…a little too enthusiastic, in his view. Both of them work very hard; his dad is a pilot and his mom is a flight attendant and they both have different schedules, so they don’t see each other that often. But Monday is their day off, so they decided to dedicate that day to their family – which is kind of nice. But the trouble is that they both have very unique personalities and different views on bringing up children. This means that they constantly quarrel about what their son should and shouldn’t do. Sam sometimes receive mutually exclusive instructions that he needs to carry out RIGHT NOW. Unsurprisingly, this always ends in conflicts.

Sometimes he asks them why they can’t just go out somewhere for dinner or to the cinema all together and just have fun? But both his parents are convinced that he suffers from a lack of parental concern and guidance, and so Monday evening is the perfect time for checking up on his progress at school, having serious talks and sometimes even punishing him for something that happened a week before and which they never had time to punish him for properly until then. That’s why Sam comes back from school on Mondays not feeling relieved, but even more terrified by what awaits him in the evening. The irony is that he needs the whole week to recover from Monday.

However, these are things that are expected and understandable – he feels nervous and stressed on Mondays, and so he screws up. But Sam is certain that if anything horrible needs to happen to him, it will definitely happen on a Monday; it’s just a law of the universe. His first girlfriend decided to break up with him on a Monday. He screwed up the most important test of the year on a Monday. He got the worst bout of food poisoning of his life...that’s right, on a Monday (and vomited right in front of his PE class, which made it even more stressful). He even had to go to the hospital. And the saddest thing of all was that his pet dog he grew up with also passed away on a Monday some time ago. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or people don’t want to ruin their weekends so they always keep the worst things for Mondays – because it’s a horrible day anyway, so adding a couple of bad things can’t make it worse than it already is.