Case of the Mondays

Saying Images

In the United States, the five-day workweek (starting on Monday) goes back to New England factories in 1908. In most American businesses, the 9-5, Monday-Friday workweek is still the norm over 100 years later.

This was certainly the case in the 1999 comedy film Office Space. This film satirized US corporate/work culture and middle management. At one point in the film, the character Peter (played by Ron Livingston) complains to his coworkers that he wants to get out of the office. In response, a female employee (Jennifer Jane Emerson) states as condescendingly and annoyingly as possible that Peter has “a Case of the Mondays.” Case, here, is an “incident of a disease,” here imagined as the Mondays, the gloomy or sour mood brought by the responsibilities and obligations of a new week.

Especially due to Emerson’s delivery of the line, Case of the Mondays became one of several quotable lines from the film and helped popularize the phrase.

Before the release of Office Space, Case of the Mondays appears rarely in the written record. It was used just twice in Usenet groups prior to the release of the movie to express hatred of Mondays, for instance—and once as case of the “Mondays” in a 1976 edition of the magazine Black Enterprise, which suggests the phrase has had some, likely spoken currency before Office Space.  Still, after the film’s release, use of Case of the Mondays increased dramatically, very often in reference to Office Space.