After years of development, delays, leaks, and price hikes, the hugely anticipated release of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI is now just days away.
Barring any last-minute hiccups (and if you’ve been smart enough to pre-order your copy), Australia should wake up on 19 November, controller in hand, ready to throw back the years and binge what’s expected to be the undisputed game of the decade.
The only problem? It’s a Thursday. A work day. An inconveniently placed obstacle that we’d all much rather avoid for a free four-day run of a weekend spent on the couch in our dressing gowns, perhaps a 2-litre bottle of Pepsi Max within arm’s reach, and really throwing it back to our teenage years.
Well, according to Employment Hero, Australian men appear to have already found a solution.
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Fresh data from the employment platform shows that annual leave bookings for Thursday, 19 November are up 29% compared with the same Thursday last year, with men aged 18 to 44 responsible for a rather suspicious 84% increase in leave requests.
More tellingly, this group accounts for roughly three quarters of the total increase in leave bookings, despite representing less than a third of the workforce tracked by Employment Hero.
To be fair, Employment Hero cannot conclusively tell us why 870,275 Australian workers have decided they need a day off on 19 November. Perhaps there is an unusually large number of weddings. Maybe the nation has collectively decided to attend a dentist appointment. It could, theoretically, be anything.
But when one of the biggest video game releases in history lands on precisely the same Thursday, and the demographic most responsible for the spike happens to be the exact demographic most likely to have spent the past decade waiting for GTA VI, the circumstantial evidence is rather hard to ignore.
Frankly, I can only stand up and applaud the commitment.