Five to Eight Business Days

This is a bright, deadpan novelty indie-pop song about the one unit of time invented purely to keep you waiting: the business day. The hook is already annoyed when it arrives — five to eight business days — and the verse under it points at the thing everyone notices about a refund. The money left your account at the speed of light; the money coming back is on foot 1.

Two more waits follow. One is a streaming app that buries the show you were halfway through on the fourth or fifth row, when you were watching it thirty minutes ago, not thirty business days ago 2. The other is a hot-water repair in a new apartment: nobody came during the given time frame, and the given time frame turns out to be midnight to 11:59 p.m. 3. A pre-chorus sums it up — every company's got its own clock, and none of them run on mine — and a bridge counts the week out loud, Monday to Friday, then points out that a call placed at 4:59 on Friday gets an answer on Wednesday.

The track runs at 116 BPM on staccato piano and keys, a rubbery electric bass, handclaps and compact dry drums, with a woodblock ticking away like an office clock and one warm horn stab per chorus. The verses are talk-sung and close to the microphone; the chorus opens up into a full sung hook with a small backing group answering it line by line, and the bridge drops to piano and handclaps before the last chorus lands.

Play it while you refresh a banking app that has not moved, while you scroll for a show you know you were watching, or on the second afternoon of sitting at home waiting for someone who said they would be there between midnight and midnight. Nearly every line is the post's own wording, so each joke lands the way it did in the timeline. The words and the credit belong to @OrevaZSN, @biigrem and @BIackEyeSMITE.