In old films, everyone's favourite day of the week is Friday. Well, I can tell you one thing - it's not mine. For obvious reasons, that is. What's that? What reasons? Christ, I forget you don't do it here. Well, I suppose it's only been a couple of years back home, but it feels like longer. Where do I start? It's called Reflection, but that's not a word that tells you very much. It's a euphemism. Probably it was invented by one of the last HR people on one of their last days on the job. Sorry, I'm being obscure. Here's how it works. About five years ago, we made a big breakthrough with our computer chips. Don't ask me how, but they got a lot more efficient. Something to do with gallium, I think. Anyway, because they got more efficient, and cheaper as well, we were able to run a lot more of them at once. It was like Moore's Law had started working all over again. For the first year things were brilliant. We got new mobile phones that you don't need to charge. They run on a milliwatt of power, which they glean from the heat of your palm. You'd have them in this country, too, if it weren't for the embargo. But trust me, you're better off not having them. Predictably, it was the techies who screwed everything up. Do you remember when we were kids and everyone got properly excited about AI? How it was supposed to write screenplays and fly aeroplanes and maybe even destroy the world? Well you know how that went. It turned out that it was really good for telling you ten fascinating facts about Riga or making porn of your friend's mum, but it never really went beyond that. So then we all stopped talking about AI and it just became something you use from time to time in Microsoft Word. Barely more exciting than spellcheck. But I guess the tech guys never stopped dreaming because when we got those new chips the first thing they did was try and run AIs on them. They must have reckoned that a few orders of magnitude more computing power would finally be enough to destroy the world. Well they were wrong about that. We're still here, aren't we? But their new AIs could do what was supposed to happen the first time round. They put everyone out of a job. I should correct myself. They didn't put everyone out of a job. But they did put me and all of my friends out of a job. They put every accountant out of a job, and every graphic designer. Every paralegal and every business analyst too. The programmers lost their jobs, which they damn well deserved. Most salespeople lost their jobs, because at some point the computers just started selling straight to themselves. And after the cull of the cubicle drones and the workers-from-home, the managers had no-one to manage, and human resources found themselves without resource. So the law of the market did away with them as well. It took six months. Sometimes history really has its skates on. A full third of the workforce were made redundant, including a large majority of the middle class. The politicians were not deaf to the plight of their core constituents. With uncharacteristic urgency, helped by the sublime efficiency of the newly automated civil service, the government rushed through a UBI bill. In normal times it would have turned us into Zimbabwe, but the rules of the game had changed. The economy was so productive with the new AIs in charge that the exchequer could pay every working adult fifty grand a year, tax free, and prices would barely rise. This solved things. For about a week. Which happened to be about as much time as it took for the two thirds of people who were still gainfully employed to realise that they didn't fancy turning up for work any more. It's true that not everyone quit; many people felt an admirable sense of duty. They had always understood that theirs were jobs which really needed doing. But the cumulative effect was still enormous - larger than any general strike in history, and with no clear pathway to resolution. Again, the government acted decisively (this was starting to be a trend). Emergency legislation was rushed through Parliament requiring anyone who had quit their job in the last fortnight to return to work with immediate effect. Our society, in which so many people had been content to spend their time drafting emails, signing PDFs, and discovering new and exciting uses for PivotTables, had been an unfair one. But it had been tolerably unfair. Now that the white-collar class had become a leisure class, the injustice was too much to bear. On the same day that the bill ordering people back to work was passed, the army was deployed onto the streets. Covertly, trade union leaders were summoned to Westminster. It was clear that a settlement was needed. The idea came from the head of the teacher's union. She explained to those assembled that in New York, when a tenured teacher is accused of misconduct, they are required to await their hearing in a room with white walls and no windows. They have to show up every day and keep themselves entertained. Some of them choose to quit rather than wait it out, but all of them hate it. This was the inspiration for Reflection. How it works is simple. To claim your UBI, you must be present at your local Reflection centre between the hours of 9 and 5 each Friday. Cups of tea and somewhat comfortable chairs are provided. The walls are empty, though a calming blue instead of sterile white. The only permissible activity is silent thought. The lunch break is thirty minutes. The policy was announced in a whirl of propaganda. From a Downing Street podium, the Prime Minister declaimed the necessity of meditation, introspection, and deep sustained thought for the improvement of society. It was suggested that this was something that had always been vital for a well-functioning state. In fact, it was down to nothing more than sheer luck that in the past we had gotten by without it. Of course, this was not convincing. But pretending that what they were doing had purpose was not a new exercise for most Reflection goers. In fact, it's a genius solution, and a humane one too. The simple fact is that ours is now a country with only a certain number of jobs that need to be done, and that number happens to be less than the number of people available to do them. The fact that there were enough jobs for everyone in the past was just an accident of economics. The purpose of Reflection is to be the least cruel alternative to work that some people will still take up a job to avoid. What would we do otherwise? Bring back the stocks? It's still a free country. So some people chose to retrain in the trades, instead of undergoing Reflection. As a matter of fact, some others who have the qualifications to do so switch in the opposite direction. (Did I mention that you need a degree to do Reflection? The Universities lobbied hard for that). The government tweaks the laws of Reflection according to supply and demand. Once there was a crisis of plumbers which was rectified in short order by tightening the Reflection centre dress code. Veteran ministers noted how much easier this was than in the bad old days when you had to convince people to emigrate from Silesia. Each month a few more jobs are mechanised, and a hundred thousand more people switch to doing Reflection. Half of all working adults do it now, and we've all gotten very good at thinking. In the first year, some bright sparks cracked a few unsolved maths problems. But most of us have more routine ways to pass the time. An unlikely winner has been Islam. Thanks to an amendment proposed by the Lords Spiritual, it is actually allowed to bring a copy of a recognised religious text to Reflection. This has led to a remarkable surge in people of no previous faith choosing to learn the Qu'ran by heart. Pleased with this development, the Muslim Council has successfully lobbied for certain Reflection centres to be painted green instead of calming blue, with geometric tiles on the ceilings. I still go to a blue centre, though, since I don't like religion much. My current pastime is to act out plays in my head. After several months effort, I can now put on a respectable matinee showing of the Tempest, all within the narrow confines of my skull. I'm going to do Waiting for Godot next; the theme feels appropriate. So that's why I find it funny to remember how people used to like Fridays. For obvious reasons, I don't like them much at all. One day, I expect every last job will be automated and then we won't need Reflection any more. People won't like Fridays then but they won't hate them either. We'll stop marking out the days and it'll be Sunday afternoon for the rest of recorded time. Yes, we'll do that. It's in our nature to do things like that. If we could dissolve the moon, we'd do that too, if only to halt the tides.