Leap Year Means You’re Working For Free on Monday

If you’re a salaried employee, you’re working for free this coming Monday, and it’s all because of Caesar Augustus.

Yes, really. Here’s why:

There are 365 days in a year, right? Wrong. There are 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds.

But we’re not going to set out clocks back almost six hours every New Year’s Day. That would be ludicrous. Six o’clock in the morning would be the new midnight, until the following year when noon would be the new midnight. So every four years we add an extra day in February instead. This is one of those years. You probably learned that in the third grade, but there’s more to the story.

The ancient Egyptians were the first people to figure out that the earth takes slightly longer than 365 days to revolve around the sun. They weren’t sure exactly how many hours, minutes and seconds it took, but they were smart enough and precise enough to realize that something was…off.

The Roman Empire figured it out, too, but, unlike the Egyptians, the Romans used a lunar calendar instead of a solar calendar, and it created all kinds of problems that took them a lot longer than it should have to figure out how to solve.

They started with a ten-month 29.5 day lunar calendar. Which was pretty ridiculous. That only accounted for 295 days in a 365+ day year. Around 70 days passed every year that weren’t on the calendar. The Romans just blew those days off because they were winter days that didn’t affect the harvest.

After a while, though, they got tired of wondering what day it was and not having an answer, so they wised up and added January and February. That still left them with ten spare days at the end of the year, so they added a whole extra month every couple of years after February so that winter months didn’t eventually turn into summer months.

Julius Caesar finally said enough of this nonsense and came up with a solar calendar instead of a lunar calendar. Each month then had 30 or 31 days, except for August, which had only 29 days.

Back then, February had 30 days. Today it only has 28. Why? Because Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The month of August was named after him, and he was cheesed off that July, which was named for his predecessor Julius Caesar, had two extra days in it. He filched two days from February.

So now, almost 2000 years later, if you earn a monthly salary, you end up working for free every February 29. And that’s this coming Monday.

Congress could make Leap Day a national holiday. Maybe it should. It’s bonus time. It’s like time that falls out of the sky. We’d still have 365 productive days every leap year even if no work of any kind ever took place on February 29.

Then again, February is normally a short month anyway, so salaried employees get a screaming deal three years out of four. Maybe it’s best to leave well enough alone.

The solar system doesn’t keep time like a Swiss watch. We skip Leap Year every 100 years (except every 400 years when we don’t), which means we’re scheduled to skip this whole production in the year 2100. So if you really can’t stand it, rest assured that 84 years from now you’ll get some relief.