Five Days

Five is a nice round number, and five days makes for a pleasing interval of time. It's the length of a workweek. A week, but with generous margins, a bit of wiggle room on either side.

That is not what "five days" means when it comes to video rentals. However much five days may feel like a week, five days is most certainly NOT a week. Five days is a trunkated, squozened, crammed short week with two days lopped off.

We like to stop by the video store on the way home from church on Sunday afternoons. Once we have finished enjoying our selections, we place them carefully in the basket by the door, serene in the knowledge that we can safely forget about them until next weekend.

But if we rent them on Sunday, they will be due back on Friday. And we don't drive by the video store on Friday. But if we're making a special trip, of course we'll end up renting a few more while we're at it. And whatever we rent on Friday will be due next Wednesday. And Wednesday's films are due back on Monday, and Monday's on Saturday, and Saturday's on... at this rate it will be five weeks before we once again have videos conveniently due on a Sunday afternoon.

The only way to consistently return things on time is to integrate your trips into your weekly schedule. And when your life runs on a seven day cycle, and the video store runs on a five day cycle, the only way to do that is to schedule a video stop every single day of the week. Either that or resign yourself to paying a small fortune in late fees. Whichever you choose, they win.

Week after week, they get me.

Because "five days" just feels so much like a week.