Cyber Monday

As I perused the online news articles of the day this morning, two words kept jumping out at me: Cyber Monday. What is Cyber Monday? It sounded vaguely familiar to me, but reminded me more of some bogus, made up "holiday" like "Grandparents Day" or "Sweetheart Day", you know, days the Card companies, like Hallmark, came up with to get you to buy more greeting cards. The worst offender is "Bosses Day"...who wants to buy a card for their boss? Anyway, I did a little research and found out that Cyber Monday was, in fact, a made up day. This one started in 2005 and was the idea of Scott Silverman, the head of the Shop.org website. His research concluded that online retailers were noticing a significant increase in online shopping the Monday after Black Friday (another made up day). The theory is that people are still in shopping mode and they can't help themselves from shopping, even while they are at work. Now there are newspaper articles telling people how they can do their online shopping at work and avoid the boss while doing so. Trouble is, most companies, like mine, have alerted the IT Dept to block all online shopping websites. If you try to go to one, you will be greeted with the message, ACCESS DENIED, and in smaller print, if access to this website is necessary, please send a message to the IT Dept stating your reason why (or something to that effect). So if you really want to shop online on "Cyber Monday", you need to go to work late, leave work early, or take your laptop (if you have one) to the local Starbucks or Panara Bread store, where you can shop without the big brother IT Dept watching you. Not me, I'm just trying to get in the mood for Kwanzaa!