Once an year

[092] ... [General]

I don't know if such a custom exists elsewhere, down here a day is marked to honor the aids that support your trade or profession. Machinery, tools, gadgets, instruments, and the like that makes your line of work possible. Factories, offices, workshops of all sorts, follow it giving them a day's rest. For individuals at home, a scissor, knife, screwdriver or anything you wish including pen and pencil substitute, and of course the vehicles they own, that keeps them on the move. In large establishments it's also time for a bonus. The age old custom supposedly stems from an incident of mythological background.

Today is such a day, and with changing times, offices naturally look up to their computers and laptops, printers and routers in place of typewriters and fax machines, filing cabinets and safes that once filled the working places. The law enforcing one must be doing it to their guns and rifles, though as a custom for a while than letting them take the day off. The other end too, may or may not be doing the similar in their possession, though crime never pays.

I remember a brief stint at a large office, saw the place beginning to get cleaned up a week before the day, and the staff in anticipation of two or three months bonus. A couple of us, just a few months into the setup weren't neglected and a token of appreciation seemed good enough to partly aid in buying a wristwatch that still comes to life with eighteen winds.

The day is almost a routine seeing the same scene each year. Buses and all sorts of heavy and light vehicles clean and shiny, moving around decked up in fresh flowers, and dried heaps of the same the next day at road corners. Hope the garbage pick up vans turn up tomorrow, unlike last year, after all those too obviously get pepped up, and deserve a day off, and we tend to think just from our end...