A phrase known to most people i know through the Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions, where it was featured on a calming blue floating scarf.

My father gave me the background info that this was the tagline for an old ad for laundry detergent, or maybe washing machines - yeah, i think washing machines - which would do the laundry for the poor, beleaguered housewife. Since Monday was apparently traditionally washing day, and washing was not traditionally a fun task, washing day was Blue Monday. As we all know, the quality of our lives has increased hundredfolds since then.

Since this is a time-sensitive cultural reference, the recent film adaptation of Breakfast of Champions had the depressed, chemical-dependant wife of the main character murmur Goodbye, Blue Monday! while vacantly watching television ads for wonder cures - pretty much the same thing. A(n empty?) promise of (magical) deliverance (through science or technological advances) from the everyday, mundane and tedious world.

"Goodbye, Blue Monday." was the motto of a company first named The Robo-Magic Corporation of America founded by Fred T. Barry (a Midland City TM character) in 1934. "...it's mission was to design and manufacture the first fully automatic washing machine for use in the home". This enterprise was a failure except for the control chip which the Army installed as a bomb release mechanism on bombers termed BLINC (Blast Interval Normalization Computer). Robo-Magic Corporation changed into The Midland City Ordnance Company & later Barrytron, Limited but they both kept the motto.

Additionally, the protagonist in the book, Dwayne Hoover, painted this message on a 500 pound bomb which was going to be dropped on Hamburg when he was a civilian employee in the Air Corps during the second world war.

Source: Breakfast of Champions, fiction

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