If you work from home Monday and Friday, there's a tawdry nickname for you

A trend is emerging among Canadian employees who split their time between working in their home and downtown offices — and it has gained a crude nickname.

When given the choice, more hybrid workers are staying in their soft pants on Mondays and Fridays while dressing up the rest of the week.

This new kind of work schedule has become so popular, it's given rise to a crude abbreviation. 

It's an acronym, made up of the first letters of the days of the week that these employees are in the office, that forms a slang term for female genitalia: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Using anonymized location data from cellular phones, commercial real estate firm Avison Young has been tracking the gradual return of downtown workers in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. 

Over the last five months, foot traffic in those urban centres was heaviest on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays — and lightest on Mondays and Fridays.

A similar pattern was seen in May on public transit in three Canadian cities. In Toronto, average boarding numbers on subway trains were 663,000 on Mondays versus 751,000 on Thursdays. 

Also in May, there were noticeably fewer passengers taking the Toronto subway southbound from the Bloor-Yonge station into the downtown core on Mondays and Fridays, compared to Wednesdays and Thursdays.

People boarding buses and trains set to depart downtown Vancouver between the hours of 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. would peak in the middle of the week and drop off on Mondays and Fridays, according to numbers from TransLink.

Ridership on Calgary buses followed a similar pattern, peaking mid-week and dropping on Mondays and Fridays, according to numbers from the city.

With more employees setting their own schedules and working from home Mondays and Fridays, some businesses who rely on office workers are feeling the pinch — such as Cecile Lau's coffee kiosks, which are located within Calgary's network of downtown walkways.

"So [over] the last month, Mondays and Fridays are doing half of the sales compared to mid-week — Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays," said Lau. "It's like we're operating four days. But it's an expense on the fifth day, because even if it's slow, I have to put staff here."

The caffeine purveyor said she is also getting fewer requests to cater corporate lunches on Mondays and Fridays, which she calls a big blow after having made it through two lean years of pandemic restrictions and office closures.