You gotta love the summer season around the old ad agency.

You see, my Corporate Overlords provide us downtrodden minions with a generous boon called “summer Fridays,” i.e., four Fridays off with pay, which you can take at your own discretion, anytime between Memorial Day and Labor Day, workflow allowing. These days don’t count against your vacation time, either; they’re essentially bonus holidays. This particular perk is, no surprise, a very popular institution, but it tends to generate some strange side-effects for those of us who are left at work while everyone else is off, um, summer Fridaying.

For one thing, the office is eerily quiet, because roughly one-third to one-half of the 400-some-odd staffers are out. The building gets pretty chilly, too, without the extra bodies and running computers to warm the place up, and as the day wears on and the daylight outside begins to soften with the onset of evening, the basement cube-farm of this century-old brick pile starts to feel like a set piece from the latest zombie-apocalypse movie.

Then there are toddlers and pets who occasionally make appearances because their folks have to work and are unable to make other arrangements. This can happen anytime, of course, but it seems to happen more in the summer, and especially on summer Fridays, I guess because there are fewer management types around to care. These special guest stars aren’t really a problem, but they have a tendency to wander off on their own, lured by the irresistible mysteries of a post-zombie-apocalypse cube farm. Which means that while I’m sitting here typing this, I can see a tiny Boston terrier/pug mix named after a Cimmerian deity wandering around at the edges of my peripheral vision.

And then of course there are the mental effects caused by the oppressive isolation and loneliness of this depopulated environment. Basically, summer Fridays make those poor devils who are left behind quite insane. A harsh accusation I know, but let me provide my evidence: You occasionally hear maniacal laughter echoing from the other side of the basement. You see random notes in the break room offering free cupcakes, but there is no evidence that a cupcake has even passed within sensor-range of that room for weeks. Assistant creative directors (the actual creative directors are always out of the office on Fridays, both summer and otherwise) putt golf balls down the aisles between the cubicles. And some account supervisors think that a 15,000-word document delivered to proofreading at 4 PM can be finished by 6, or “quitting time,” as we like to call it. Fifteen thousand words, for you lay-people who don’t deal in such things for a living is about 50 pages. Fifty brand-new, error-ridden pages that have never been seen by an editorial eye, and they want it in only two hours…

I just heard another peal of maniacal laughter.

Oh, wait… that was me.

And I just scared the dog away. Sorry, little guy…