11 Irrational Things That Will Drive You Crazy Just Because It’s Monday

1. Being put on hold.

On Mondays, with your tolerance for humans at an all-time low, just about anything can trip you up, ruffle your feathers. Some Monday disturbances are unavoidable; but for the ones that aren’t, it’s important that you dodge them at all costs. Hotlines, for instance, but also Time Warner Cable, any multinational brands, or your healthcare provider – they can all wait till Tuesday.

2. Being told, “You seem upset.”

The last thing you need on a Monday is for someone to point out the obvious. It’s only when someone does so in a searching, presumptuous, and concerned-with-little-to-offer tone that’s typical of your friend’s judgmental mother, that you enter some seriously dicey territory. You know they’re just trying to help, but you also know that these words weigh on you like a very scary, padded-cell-flavored premonition.

3. Your local coffee shop ran out of your favorite donut.

While certainly an apt start to the week, learning that your local coffee shop has sold out of your favorite donut before 9am is nonetheless harrowing. On a Wednesday or a Thursday this might be forgivable, but on a Monday it is nothing less than criminal. It is a direct affront to you and no one else, and reason enough to walk right through the emergency exit doors of the subway station without holding it for the person behind you. You hate to admit it, but when you hear the sound of the door thumping against the person’s body behind you, you feel a tinge of relief.

4. $10 minimums.

On Mondays you are not just miserable, but evil. You become the villain in your own devastating film you call life. You are the Grinch, out to find and dismantle anyone who dares to walk with a pep in their step.

$10 minimums – a fact of life that you usually surrender yourself to – happen to take on an entirely new air of illicitness on a Monday morning. Suddenly you recall that one time someone told you that all credit card minimums are complete BS and, because it’s Monday, you decide that now’s a good time to raise this with the clerk. Even if you don’t win the argument, you still feel as if you’ve won a tiny victory – and for no other reason than you succeeded in holding up the people waiting in line behind you.

5. Someone sneezes near you.

Your reaction alone suggests you just witnessed a sex offender in action, when in fact it was nothing but a sneeze. Then again, on Mondays there is no such thing as “nothing but a sneeze.” On Friday, you would have offered a hearty “Gesundheit!” but on Mondays, anyone who sneezes in your vicinity has done so intentionally. And what’s more: it is just but one tiny slice of their much grander ruse to shower you with germs and ultimately ensure you contract cholera.

6. Glancing at the to-do list you made on Friday.

Mondays are in such stark and morbid contrast to Fridays, just glancing at the overzealous (and let’s face it: fanciful) to-do list you so audaciously compiled on Friday is enough to induce a wave of lethal nausea. Who am I? you think to yourself as you make out the words “tie-dye your bed spread.” A despicable humanoid, that’s who.

7. The ice cream truck jingle.

You can faintly recall running after the ice cream truck in 3rd grade, with the jubilation of innocence mixed with algebra. But on Mondays, that once-sweet ditty is alarming enough to insert fictitious and highly traumatic experiences into your catalog of memories. It is now no longer the soundtrack to Choco Tacos on the beach, but to that imaginary time you were kidnapped in the cereal aisle of a grocery store and subsequently held captive in a cold, dark basement.

8. Someone telling you to smile.

It’s a deeply sick human who dares to make such a bold declaration on a Monday. Even on a Friday this would get your blood boiling. But on a Monday, you consider it to be on par with a federal offense. At the time, you couldn’t think of a vicious comeback quick enough because, well, it’s Monday and – face it – you’re slow. So instead you spend the remainder of your day quietly seething and mumbling pathetic rejoinders to yourself. That is to say: you spend the remainder of your day productively.

9. The dreaded #Workflow.

On Mondays, you wish a very rare ilk of harm upon the couple who spent the hours before work practicing couples yoga and documenting their flexible and symmetrical couple-y shenanigans. Yet whereas these types of photos become a great deal funnier after your first cup of coffee, the #workflow ones do not. As you know, Mondays are best suited for collective commiserating. Like all unwanted and illegal intruders, any mention of #workflow will be sought out and obliterated.

10. A barely detectable dip in Internet speed.

It doesn’t matter that you have 17 windows open on your computer, or that you also happen to be downloading 40 torrents at once. Today is Monday and there isn’t a single thing that could keep you from remaining irrational. Which means the slightest blip in your internet’s capacity is not only unacceptable, but most certainly warrants a very lengthy and angry call to Time Warner Cable – possibly even with a lawsuit thrown in at the end, for good luck.

11. Someone smiling at nothing.

And don’t even get you started with the man sitting on the train to work, eyes closed, and smiling like an unrepentant murderer. Does it get any more perverted than that? You’d like to hope not. Unless he’s smiling because he just got someone arrested for slurping. Then he’s cool.