An inconvenient truth

Let us petition the United States Government to rename Columbus Day as National Inconvenience Day. The reasons for doing so are numerous:

1.) It is a well-known scientific and historical fact that Christopher Columbus did NOT discover the American continent. The Vikings discovered it and attempted to colonize it almost 400 years earlier. Columbus himself died thinking that he had found India, and he never even set foot on the mainland. From the evidence we have, it seems Columbus was lucky his ships didn't sink and his entire crew drowned the moment they left the dock. The man was an idiot; brave, but stupid.

2.) Who gets Columbus Day off? Postal workers and bank employees (i.e., no one that you or I know). Like every other stupid fly-by-night holiday, the only ones who benefit from time off are the ones who handle your money and deliver your post. The only thing this accomplishes is that I can't mail letters or get coins to do laundry. Granted, this is becoming less of a problem in the electronic age, but it still annoys the piss out of me.

3.) Who benefits from Columbus Day? The only people I can think of are people who are thinking about buying furniture and people who are re-flooring their kitchen. I haven't even seen ads this year for a J.C. Penny Columbus Day sale, which makes me think that they've given up (I mean, who has time to shop there when we're all at work?).

So to sum up, we're celebrating the non-discovery of a continent via Caribbean islands by a jackass who didn't even know where he was, and we do this by closing our financial and money-handling businesses while we still shuffle ourselves to work thereby handicapping our ability to get things done and making it harder to get money to buy the furniture that we don't need that's on sale.

What was the point of this holiday again?  If you're going to declare a holiday just for the sake of having one, at least give everyone else the day off (firemen and policemen not withstanding) instead of giving it to a few services that the rest of us rely upon to get through our day (if everyone had it off, there'd be no need for those services anyway).  All it does otherwise is to seed unrest, like the mockery Labor Day has become (you know what I'm talking about: how managers and executives get Labor Day off but the peons that it was created to celebrate still have to work so that these high-paid a-holes can still go shopping and eating out on their day off).

Sack up, America!