S.N.O.W. Days
Remember what it was like to have a snow day as a kid? You thought you were going to have to go to school, but when you woke up, your parents had the TV on, listing the school districts that school was cancelled in for that day. Maybe you had a test that day, and you now got an extra day to study. Maybe you just wanted to play in the snow outside! Either way, snow days were generally a pretty universally positive experience. (I recognize some of you are from places that never got snow, and that’s terrible. Everyone deserves snow days!)
But as an adult, snow days are a lot worse. Maybe you’ll have to come into work anyways, or work from home, or maybe you’ll just be stressed that you have an important client coming in and “it was snowing” isn’t a great excuse. You never really get the same excited feeling that you would have as a kid. You can’t really play in the snow, so now you’re kind of just stuck at home. So even if you do get a “snow day,” it’s not the same.
Normal holidays and PTO replace some of this, and hopefully you do get some days off wherever you work. The difference between those and snow days is that they are planned days off. You might be excited for them, or maybe have some sort of trip planned, so planned days off could be a lot of fun! But your happiness or excitement is probably going to look more like a straight line upwards than a discontinuous jump. Those sorts of jumps are really exciting - it’s why people go to the casino in hopes of striking it rich, and don’t get the same sort of excitement from making a contribution to their 401k. Or why The Bachelor isn’t The Fairly Non-Committal Guy Who Will Wait An Appropriate Amount Of Time Before Proposing (granted, there may be other issues with that title). Or even why soccer announcers get a lot more excited about a goal than basketball announcers do about a team reaching 100 points. It’s a lot more fun when things (money, love, points) go up suddenly, rather than gradually. A snow day provides that sudden boost to happiness.
So how do we give adults snow days? Here’s my plan for what I’m calling SNOW (Special National Off-Work) days.
Every Monday, the president, or some other high-up official, appears on live TV and draws five numbers, 1-100, one for each day in the week after the current one. So if it’s January 1, they’re drawing numbers for the week of January 8 - 12. (If there’s already a holiday, draw fewer numbers.) If any of the numbers is a 76, the corresponding day in the next week becomes a federal holiday, and a SNOW day. Why 76? Because the US was founded in 1776, and it can’t hurt to add a little bit of patriotism around it. For SNOW days, all the typical holiday rules would apply, like companies having to pay their workers extra if they work on that day, school being closed, etc. We could recreate the magic of a snow day, but for (almost) everyone.
On average, there would be about 2.5 of these per year. So there could be years with 6 (1 in 20 years), and years with 0 (1 in 12 years), just like normal snow days. Giving everyone an extra 2.5 days off per year wouldn’t harm productivity that much, in fact I would guess the morale boost would outweigh the lost productivity. It would immediately have cultural impact: there would be tweets about the drawing being rigged, advice columns about what to do on a SNOW day, and NYT opinion articles about how Gen Z has no work ethic anymore because they’re growing up with these days. In fact, I’ve already prepared a few tweets for various situations:
Tweets For Various Situations
Situation: the number comes up 77
“pov: using your time machine to convince the founding fathers to wait a year to declare independence”
Situation: A SNOW day occurs when it is actually snowing in some part of the country
“when you finally get a SNOW day but you can’t go anywhere because it’s actually snowing 🙄”
Situation: there are 2-3 numbers in the 70s one week, but not 76
“me when congress announces 71, 73 and 78”
explanation: this is a mathematical construct known as a “graph,” and it has reached the maximum possible number of “edges”
Situation: two SNOW days in one week
“Wow! There are multiple SNOW days this upcoming week! This is certainly a surprise.”
Situation: You’re a politician campaigning for re-election, and you want to take credit for implementing SNOW days
“SNOW days are what makes America great - and in just three years of my administration, we’ve already had ten. And yet my opponent said if he was elected, he would eliminate them on his first day in office! If you vote for me, I promise we will not repeal SNOW days - not now, not ever.”
Situation: You’re a LinkedIn influencer
“During an interview a month ago, I had a brilliant candidate. Easily the best technically that I’ve ever seen. We got to the end of the interview, and I asked him a simple question. Are you willing to work on SNOW days? He started responding. ‘I’d prefer not to work on holidays.’ I stood up, pulled out a gun, and shot him. Someone like that doesn’t deserve a job in my company - or a life.”
Situation: You’ve been kidnapped. You need to pretend you’re tweeting normally, while secretly asking for help. You decide to utilize the first letters of every word in your tweet as a secret message.
“Honestly, every likable person I meet talks really abnormally. Perhaps people enjoy doing crazy articulation LOL. Like— proper, orderly loquacity is considered embarrassing?”
Would people be annoyed that they couldn’t plan for these days? Maybe. You’d get between 7 and 11 days to prepare, so you could certainly do things like “buy food” or “go to the bank.” I think the bigger issue would be things that had already been planned in advance, like doctor’s appointments. You might have to exempt certain things like appointments from the law. Another edge case would be things like gyms or restaurant reservations. They’re not medically necessary, so don’t obviously deserve an exemption, but if I made a reservation at a hard-to-get place and was really excited to eat a good meal, having my reservation cancelled would be tough. I think this is a clear downside of the SNOW days model, but I also think many of these places would be happy to have so much extra business on these days. If you run something like an arcade or a bowling alley, you’d probably make a lot more money on SNOW days than on average weekdays.
The worst thing that would happen as a result of this would probably be that people who would be forced to work on the holiday without the benefit of extra business - doctors or farmers, for example - would feel like they were missing out. It would be unfair to them, so perhaps we could allocate a fund of 20 billion per year (0.3% of the federal budget) to give certain categories of people who both would be forced to work, and wouldn’t benefit financially from these holidays, some sort of financial benefit. (Very rough math, but I’m thinking 15 million people, $500 per holiday?)
I am sure as well that there are other flaws to this idea. I’m not a public policy expert at all (if you are, let me know what the other issues are!) but I think the upsides of implementing this policy outweigh at least the initial problems I could think of.
Any president who implemented this might face an initial backlash, but I think the policy would grow to be more popular after the first couple SNOW days. In a world where this policy had already existed for 20 years, I don’t think that it would be repealed. It probably wouldn’t be divided along partisan lines - it doesn’t fit neatly into either party’s common talking points, doesn’t really hurt large donors (corporations might be a little mad?), and it’s hard to spin “more holidays” as a bad thing. I would guess Democrats might be a little more likely to support it, typically Democrats are more on the side of reducing working hours. There might be debates over what the best frequency of these days was (1 in 50, 1 in 100, 1 in 200…), but that would be helpful for the overall implementation. It would also be fun to watch presidential candidates debate whether 1 in 80 or 1 in 120 days was a better frequency, or at least more fun than the current state of presidential debates.
As far as I’m aware, SNOW days are not in the platform of any current candidate. So are you a candidate for an election? Do you want to win over exactly one voter (me)? Then your path forward is clear - announce that you’ll be implementing SNOW days if you win, and I’ll be happy to support your campaign (assuming your other policy positions are non-insane). What are you waiting for? Announce your support for SNOW days today.