A seven day week?

All through school I have been remarkable for my lack of curiosity. If education is the process of stimulating the curiosity of the student, I qualify among the most uneducated people that has been the misfortune of any school to turn out. Yet, I am periodically afflicted by curiosity about the most absurd of things.

Why is it that a week has seven days? In a world remarkable for people finding almost any flimsy excuse to violently disagree about anything, why is there such a unanimous acceptance since eons about this idea of a seven-day week? It is not even as though we are born with seven fingers making it easy to count up to seven and no more - else we would have adopted base seven math instead of the base ten math that we do use.

Perhaps it is because we are all lunatics - insofar as we all started off following the lunar month of 28 days. If you wanted to break down this number to smaller manageable proportions you had a choice of 2, 4, 7 and 14. So, unless you wished to spend five minutes to count back to some point and say, "13 days back" instead of "About two weeks back" in a jiffy, you had the choice of

1. Fourteen 2 day weeks in the month.

2. Two 14 day weeks in the month.

3. Seven 4 day weeks in the month.

4. Four 7 day weeks in the month.

The first choice, of course, must have been quite popular with the workers. With one day off per week, they would only have to work half the time. The problem, of course, would be with people who needed two days off per week. These people would have starved to death, perched on a tree with fruit hanging in front of their noses, because they would have to wait for a working day that would never come in order to do the job of picking the fruit and eating it.

The second choice would have been the employers' favorite. It is well-known that the employers of yore were wildly upset about night - and the need for sleep - coming to the working classes as much as it did to them. A fourteen day week with just one day for Church would have been just the ticket.

If they could not get that ideal 2-day week, a 4-day week would have been all right for the workers. It is the sad tale of the world that what suits one does not suit the other and the employers were quite put out by the idea of getting work done only 75% of the available time at best.

Thus, as in everything else in the world, a 7-day week was probably the compromise that left everyone moderately unhappy.

I am taking part in The Write Tribe Festival of Words 1st - 7th September 2013