At 8:30 a.m. on Friday, dozens of economics journalists will simultaneously flood the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for a monthly ritual known officially as the Employment Situation and informally as “jobs day.”

The monthly employment report is almost certainly the single most-watched of the government’s economic indicators. It’s where we learn how many jobs employers added the previous month, as well as what happened to the unemployment rate, hourly earnings and dozens of other measures of the labor market’s health. The report can move markets, influence monetary policy and set off political ripples — especially if President Trump, as he often does, weighs in on Twitter.

Jobs day has also become something of a monthly club meeting for economics nerds, complete with its own clubhouse (Twitter) and secret language: “beats” and “misses,” U-3 and U-6 (two different measures of unemployment), and an alphabet soup of obscure acronyms and abbreviations. Reporters, economists and policy wonks race to post charts; call out interesting tidbits; and, inevitably, argue about how to interpret the latest batch of data.

I’ve participated in this frenzy nearly every month since 2011. I have covered job reports for The Wall Street Journal, for the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight and now for The Times. When jobs day happened to fall during my two-week break between news outlets last year, I couldn’t stay away — I covered the report on my personal Twitter account. (You think that’s bad? A colleague at The Upshot, Neil Irwin, did the same while on his honeymoon.)