What a day; we need to celebrate

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Uh-oh. We only have 72 hours left until International Administrative Professionals Day.

Finished all that Administrative Professionals Day shopping yet? Planned the big Administrative Professionals Day feast and the proper Administrative Professionals Day toast? Put up the Administrative Professionals Day lights yet? The desk wreath?

Well?

Better hurry. The big day is Wednesday; the bank and post office may be closed, and then we all will be in trouble with every clerk, secretary, receptionist and aide on Earth. Doomed. For as everyone knows, they run the planet. The entire U.S. government steps to the administrative beat, accentuated by the tap of keyboards and the twitter of phone systems too complex for even NASA to handle.

The upcoming holiday used to be called National Secretaries Day, created by an advertising agency in 1952. It was retooled with the aforementioned title eight years ago and since has grown into a whole Administrative Professionals Week and maybe even a kajillion-dollar industry, what with all those greeting cards and simulated-crystal bud vases that will appear in offices any moment now.

It is quite an official holiday, though. Administrative Professionals Day is a registered trademark held by the Missouri-based International Association of Administrative Professionals, which offers guidelines for panic-stricken bosses on how to "observe" the day.

But administrative professionals better move over.

April 26 -- like every other day on the calendar -- hosts a bunch of other holidays as well, proof that humans aren't happy unless they're celebrating something. Anything.

It's also National Richter Scale Day, for one, meant to honor seismologist Charles Francis Richter, born April 26, 1900. He's the inventor of the earthquake magnitude measurement system that bears his name and makes people living in, say, Sierra Madre, Calif., somewhat uneasy.

Hallmark has yet to discover National Richter Scale Day, but one never knows. Certainly some National Richter Scale Day greeting cards are in order -- the All Shook Up line would make sense -- and perhaps a line of refrigerator magnets.