Is your rent due by the 15th of every month (like Thursday this time)? What if you don't get paid until the 16th that week (a Friday)? You want to pay 30 bucks for a bounced check? How would you like it if every Thursday was the 4th of the month, or the 11th, or the 18th, or the 25th -- always, no matter what month it is?

That would make life so simple -- for remembering appointments, calibrating bimonthly pay checks with fixed-date bank payments, knowing what Monday's date is, etc. As simple as memorizing the multiplication table when you were in third grade.

Why can't we do this now? Because the stupid calendar we use has the "30 days hath September" structure, which means that only March (on non-Leap Years) applies the same numbers to the same weekdays as on the prior month. Why should that be, since it is so irrational and causes a lot of confusion? It also causes fixed holidays like Christmas to move around so that some years you get four days off and others only two. And causes personnel departments to go crazy over whether you should get an extra day on the July 4th weekend when you might have already had a Monday fill day after New Year's and that will disrupt their niggardly 6-day allowance for the year.

Taxes are due April 15th, unless it's a Sunday, in which case it will be April 16th. Why? I'd rather do it on a Sunday than on a Wednesday, when there are other things to do. (And no, I NEVER do my taxes in advance.) What if April 15th always fell on a Monday? Cool.

So how can this sort of thing be arranged? Simple: make every month consist of four 7-day weeks (28 days). Problem: that leaves 29 days of the year unaccounted for. Solution: we need to add another month to the year (and tack on the extra one day, or two days on Leap Years -- which should both be National holidays). Drawbacks: Thirteen months does not divide conveniently into quarters, so banking and other establishments will have to revise the dates of their quarterly statements, and weathermen likewise with the official starts of 'seasons' (which anyway hang on 21 or 22 of any month). Tradition: Nobody wants their 'time clock' messed around with -- there were riots in England in the reign of George II when the Julian calendar was adjusted to the Gregorian and 11 days were 'lost'.

What should this new month be called? Title of this web page (Triskaidekamber), meaning the 13th month in Greek, compared to December, which is the tenth month in Latin [but that's because they started their new year on March 1, so February was their 12th month]. I don't happen to know the Latin for 13, although their name for 12 is something like duodecimo, and Duodecimomber would be worse for February than February is for us (most of whom can't pronounce even that properly). The Greek at least could be shortened to something like Triskember. But I'm suggesting that it be called 'Grobius', because this is my proposal. [Just think -- the Grobian Calendar, like the Celsius Scale!]

What would this involve?

Well, lots of things! In fact it would disrupt the world economy a lot more than this Y2K business. So why should we do it? Bite the damn bullet, most industries went metric, didn't they? Whether the people went along with it or not doesn't matter -- America still uses Fahrenheit and Miles, Feet and Pounds, Ounces and Quarts for the sake of the mass communication to people who cannot ever accept the other scales. There will be the same problems with the new calendar. For one thing, December 25 (Christmas) will fall 21 days earlier than before -- or something like that (I am not a mathematician), which will put it around current Thanksgiving. Is that a problem? Not to me, because that moves Thanksgiving closer to early autumn weather. Fourth of July will occur in the middle of June in current terms, and that's OK too, because it's usually too damn hot by July to enjoy that holiday.

Converting the calendar also involves a lot of restructuring: (1) Calendar makers (although most DATES would stay the same -- e.g., Valentine's Day will still be on 2/14, the only big problem being Memorial Day; New Year's Eve will of course be 13/29 or 13/30 and Xmas will have been displaced seasonally back a month, although still 12/25),
(2) Financial and fiduciary entities (just a matter of specifying when quarters occur, and once determined, their calculations will actually be simpler: 3/7, 6/14, 9/21, and 13/28, just remember to multiply 7 by the quarter number to get the day, which could be taught in accounting school -- those are all Sundays, by the way),
(3) Birthdays and things like that (the month 'Grobius' will be empty of this sort of thing for a while for everybody who has a December anniversary, which will have been 'physically' pushed back a month, likewise, if your birthday is February 1 it will now become, in effect, January 29.) [Question: When does Aquarius start in the new calendar? Damned if I know -- let the experts work that out. Capricorn will begin in 'Grobius', which is apt because Grobius is a Capricorn.]
(4) Computers Ah, now we come to the meat of the issue! As an unemployed programmer looking for work I can guarantee you my full attention and expertise in making your programs M13-compliant.

How would it be implemented?