Wednesdays and telephone

For some reason on Wednesdays, the NoVa traffic is bad. Now, we're not talking about just typical bad here. It seems that for some reason on Wednesdays, every person and his brother around here hops in his car around 8.30AM and decides to add to his own misery. A drive that ought to take twenty minutes instead takes forty-five, and obviously it's truly a joyful thing.

I heard a rumor once about why Wednesday traffic in the suburbs is particularly atrocious. A friend's husband works contracted to the government and heard that federal employees cannot telecommute on Wednesdays. In fact, he had heard that it was the only day that all employees must physically go into the office. Hence, their explanation for the terrible Wednesday traffic. I asked someone else a few weeks later, and heard a completely different story about federal employees and Wednesdays. I can't remember what that second story was, but it sounded like another game of telephone to me.

You remember that game telephone? One kid whispers a silly sentence in another's ear, then that person passes it along. Each kid passes the whisper around the circle until the final person who's heard it blurts it out; and if the final result even mildly resembles what the first kid whispered oh-so-long ago, then the game has failed miserably. I'm beginning to think that rumors in the suburbs work like this game. People live so far apart, meet only occasionally and by chance in far apart places. There's too much time between whisperings, there's no way the rumors we're getting are quality by the time they reach our ears. Or maybe their higher quality because there's more time for them to be warped....? The point, though, is that we may never know why the traffic is so bad on Wednesday mornings. But if you can suffer through it, you're one step closer to the weekend.