It should be a rule.

When you live in a town such as Fort St. John where the winters can be so long and cold and snowy, any winter day with sun and relatively warm temperatures should be an automatic holiday, especially for us poor saps who toil away in the modern dungeons we euphemistically call offices.

After all, if it is dark when we go to work and dark when we go home on a typical winter workday, we should be given the chance to enjoy the sun and warmth when it is at its best, right?

But what about the time we miss? What about the work that won’t be done? What about the lost productivity?

What about it?

The economy can crash for all I care.

I just want a few hours in the light of day, a few hours to bask in the bright, shining glory of the real world, a few hours away from the buzz of fluorescent bulbs and the selfishly indignant whining of colleagues posing as martyrs for the common cause of wasting our precious time on this beautiful planet with turning straw into gold just to turn it back into straw again, just so that I won’t feel as though my life was a total loss.

Because you want to know what really makes me angry?

Anybody forcing me to stay inside.

Especially when the inside in question is an office and the reason for staying inside is a job just like any other job, a pointless march into the all too comfortable obscurity of dull and tedious retirement that only glorifies and perpetuates the destruction of that beautiful planet, completely missing the last days of its waning beauty in the process.

And we should just face the facts anyway: most of us aren’t really doing anything of value with our office time, particularly on these warm and sunny days when we are constantly gazing through our little windows to the outside, yearning to be free from the shackles of desks and computers and telephones.

It isn’t that I want – or expect – a life of pure fun and recreation in the great outdoors, although that would be nice.

Maybe I would just prefer the agrarian lifestyle of a subsistence farmer, where being outside for hours on end isn’t just a rare gift, but an actual necessity. A lifestyle where my connection to the outdoors – the land – is urgent and intimate in a way that my connection to my office could never possibly be.

Maybe I would prefer the primitive misery of a starving peasant to the bourgeois melancholy of an office rat routinely performing his nine-to-five, dutifully paying his bills, all obligatory nods and smiles and handshakes.

Maybe I should just take my warm, sunny winter day holidays on my own volition and let the cards fall where they may.