Being a self-proclaimed “workaholic”, my reasoning for thinking the Monday after each year’s Super Bowl should be a national holiday, is far from me wanting to take another day off of running the truck. Quite the contrary, I'm usually one of the more clear-eyed and alert people the day after, ready to get back to business as usual. Unfortunately, the same can often not be said for the numerous people who end up “calling in sick” the day after the biggest football game of the year.
The night of Super Bowl Sunday used to offer up its own challenges throughout my years of being a truck driver, with many inebriated drivers often taking the wheel of their vehicles to drive home from various game watching parties. Not that I'm against letting loose and celebrating, but I do highly endorse doing it responsibly! My plan was always to either call a cab, bum a ride from a DD, or crash on the host’s couch if need be, since I was usually good at getting in my ‘day-off request’ for the Monday after in before the rest of my co-workers.
This leads me to the observation part on this new declaration for a national holiday. Every year, I seem to always find myself loading, or unloading, at warehouses that are inevitably understaffed, due to no fault of their own, the day after Super Bowl. The past couple years that I've been keeping track of this trend, I have actually begun to question the shipping and receiving managers as to what the problem might be. Their answer has always been the same on most occasions, believe it or not, that they have had unplanned staff “call in sick” for work that day.
This trend is not an isolated phenomenon either. If you've been at this long enough, chances are that you've seen it after revolving holidays on the calendar as well, when people try to “extend” their holiday time off by calling in “sick”. So, if the fact is that productivity is going to slow down, because of excessive absences from suppliers to our industry on this day, I think it would only be fitting to claim this day a new national holiday! Not that it would be declared, but a trucker can dream, right?