When you have a bad case of the Sunday nights

Sunday nights are much worse than August, as at least the first couple of weeks of August are still vacation season.

By all accounts, the cruelest night is Sunday, right up there – or down there – on the calendar hate list with the day after Labor Day and Jan. 2 and practically any day in February.

So, as a service to us working schlubs everywhere, here are the top 10 ways on a Sunday night to distract yourself from thinking about work on Monday.

(10) Spend the evening studying the happy hour drink menu at your go-to bar so you can instantly order what you want at 5:01 p.m. on Friday. And again at 5:02 p.m. Friday.

(9) Hire the teenage computer geek who lives next door to hack your work’s computer system and credit you with a vacation day for every Monday through, oh, 2024.

(8) Fantasize briefly about what you would do if you won $50 million in the lottery: new home, sports car, world domination. Then get real and treat yourself to what you can actually afford – a $2 Frosty from Wendy’s.

(7) Make a list of the 17,458 things you’d rather do than go to work. Start with “have a colonoscopy.”

(6) Close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply and imagine you’re on the beach on a sunny afternoon, the waves gently and hypnotically splashing ashore. Then hop in the car and drive to your local, polluted, duck-dropping infested community pond, which is the closest you’re going to get to real water in at least seven months.

(5) Make plans for the next 2,395 Saturdays. First up: Sleep in to noon (and that’s noon into Sunday).

(4) Plan a weeklong summer vacation that you will never take because one of the kids always gets sick or the vacation fund becomes the transmission-repair fund.

(3) Distraction No. 3 intentionally left blank because the writer’s mind is drawing a blank.

(2) Practice your coughing and wheezing so that they sound at least somewhat realistic when you call out sick Monday morning.

(1) Gather all of the alarm clocks and clock radios from the house in a pile in the yard and take a sledgehammer and smash them into tiny, little-bitty, gratifying pieces. Then set your smartphone alarm for 6 a.m. like you’ve been doing every damn work night for the last 10 years.

Enjoy!