Everybody's Workin' For The Weekend!

Ah, a great, cheesy classic American rock song! Wasn't it so right, too? In the 80's when that song came out, everybody was working for the weekend. Your week was simply black and white; you worked Monday through Friday and at 5pm on Friday you free and clear until Monday morning at 8am. Let's a take a look at how things have (DRASTICALLY) changed since the good ol' days.

It's 1981, Loverboy was climbing to the top of the charts with their hit song 'Working for the Weekend'. People are getting their MBA degrees like a they were in a Waco, TX cult (because, at that time, that was the only way to get ahead in your field-get a higher degree). Saturday morning cartoons were worth getting up for. Micheal Jordan and Kirby Puckett were sports idols you didn't mind if your kids worshiped; in fact, you preferred it!

Things have changed considerably in the past 20 years. Your degree clearly doesn't indicate your income level anymore and your week is hardly black and white, rather, it is a shade of gray. Your seniority at your company doesn't mean a gosh-darn thing! You may be there for 15 years, and then some kid right out of college starts working there, she saves the company $1M her first year, next thing you know, you are reporting to her!

Today, you may go in to work at 10am on Saturday and take Monday off, as more and more companies go towards a Results Only Work Environment, which was started by the Best Buy Corporation in Minnesota. You may log into your work email account after the kids have gone to bed. Or you may respond to a email message on your Blackberry while you are on a family hike up north somewhere. It's not uncommon to see flip flops in place of shoes on a Friday at the office, or to have a small dog come visit you in your cube, for the workplace is changing.

It's refreshing to me to see that parents careers don't have to be placed on hold while they stay home to raise their offspring. The 'mommy track' isn't a term that's thrown around too much these days (if you aren't familiar with that corporate lingo, 'mommy track' refers to someone that no longer can climb the corporate ladder because she has kids at home). What's more, if you want to stay at home full time while maintaining an income, you have the freedom to do so with a home based businesses, telecommuting, and/or consulting. These are great times we live in!

If Loverboy had written that song today, half of the entire US workforce wouldn't understand why we were working for the weekend, because for me, right now I just realized that it is 3:21pm on a Saturday, and I have a BBQ to be to in an hour. I have probably been working for a good hour or two on this beautiful Saturday. But I am not in some office working on a mainframe computer, rather, I am on my laptop, sitting at my kitchen table, with access to unlimited iced tea at my beckon call (as long as I walk to the kitchen, brew it, and serve myself. My wife would just laugh if I asked her to get some for me....ok, I went off on a tangent).

As for that line 'you want a piece of my heart?' from the same song in question, well, that just plain doesn't make sense!