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A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

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Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#11

Post by tsunamifury »

Ajay-p wrote: post #7

I am struggling to believe all of this. It feels like a calendar that was used but then someone later filed it in with all of this artwork, and commentary after the fact. Recording events that already happened. If this was a desk calendar, someone would have noticed, and noticed the content. If it's true, it's a glimpse into the past and thinking of someone in a very important position during a very difficult time in…

The retrospective nature of knowing every important event and saying oh today was X seems improbable at best

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#12

Post by Spooky23 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #8
Ajay-p wrote: post #7

I am struggling to believe all of this. It feels like a calendar that was used but then someone later filed it in with all of this artwork, and commentary after the fact. Recording events that already happened. If this was a desk calendar, someone would have noticed, and noticed the content. If it's true, it's a glimpse into the past and thinking of someone in a very important position during a very difficult time in…

I concur on its authenticity. It looks like someone's craft project using an old calendar. Nicely done, though, however it originated: I wish I could letter and doodle so neatly.

I started working in offices around 1998 as an intern. The place I worked used email heavily, but had no shared calendar. Definitely people who did stuff like this. My boss had a bound dated diary book that he used to record what happened (vs where he had to be) decorated which he decorated with interesting doodles, etc.

We lost something with Outlook for everything.

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#13

Post by ryandrake »

Schattenbaer wrote: post #6
Spooky23 wrote: post #4

This is great, but this person is 4/10 on the disgruntled scale. A truly miserable government worker has a daily countdown to retirement. At extreme levels, down to the hour.

Was about to leave a similar comment. A lot of this was pretty neutral, some of it heart-warming, and there isn't a lot of evidence of negativity here. And I loved the little illustrations, all in all it felt like someone who took effort to make their environment prettier.

I was going to say, too! This seems absolutely joyful in comparison to my dreary (online) work calendar which just contains the same weekly recurring status meetings with the same people week after week, color coded by project.

It would be cool to have interoperability between calendar software and illustrative art software so modern office workers could create something like this during downtime/boredom!

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#15

Post by egypturnash »

Ajay-p wrote: post #7

I am struggling to believe all of this. It feels like a calendar that was used but then someone later filed it in with all of this artwork, and commentary after the fact. Recording events that already happened. If this was a desk calendar, someone would have noticed, and noticed the content. If it's true, it's a glimpse into the past and thinking of someone in a very important position during a very difficult time in…

You really think someone's gonna go back and do this for nine years of calendars? Look up something that happened every day to see if there's anything to make a doodle about?

Imagine: It is 1981. You are working deep inside a bureaucracy. Social media does not exist, there is no equivalent to checking Hacker News for "a few minutes" and blowing an entire hour on it. Usenet barely exists - it was established last year. You might not even have a computer on your desk. You certainly can't take out your smartphone and scroll through TikTok to kill some time seeing what the algorithm has for you today.

What you do have is this big desk calendar and a bunch of markers. Sometimes when something notable happens, you make a little doodle about it. Sometimes you start to get elaborate, but it's hard to blow more than a few minutes when you have a square that's only about an inch and a half across, and your markers are kinda blunt. It's a way to amuse yourself in a job that's pretty boring sometimes. Over time it becomes a habit.

Nobody's gonna see it. It's on your desk. It's under all the books and papers you're using to do your job. And it's right there whenever you need to take a break from thinking about whatever you're supposed to be doing. Hell, some of it might even be job-related - this person was an "analyst" and if they were analyzing world events then taking notes in here might have served as a nice little adjunct to their memory.

For a modern version, type "bullet journal" into an image search sometime, and be amazed at how complicated people can get with making doodles next to their daily planning. There's more to life than just dryly cranking out whatever you're obligated to do.

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#16

Post by Isamu »

woutersf wrote: post #10
Ajay-p wrote: post #7

I am struggling to believe all of this. It feels like a calendar that was used but then someone later filed it in with all of this artwork, and commentary after the fact. Recording events that already happened. If this was a desk calendar, someone would have noticed, and noticed the content. If it's true, it's a glimpse into the past and thinking of someone in a very important position during a very difficult time in…

About the drawing: i draw like this on everything too. Agendas, todo lists. Its not like i want to do this. Its to keep my fingers busy. I can attest that some people’s paper is filled with drawings ugly and nice. I cant speak about the authenticity of this document.

Yeah the drawing thing is a compulsion. It’s hard for others to understand but that’s okay. I used to draw all the time but now I miss it.

I used to be compulsive about making things. Way back when they still issued business cards I had to make geometric constructions with them.

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#17

Post by bee_rider »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #9

They would be better gruntled two years later since K.U. would win the NCAAA Tournament in 1987.

There should be a word for these back-formations that specifically come from cutting this prefix looking thing off the front of a word to invert their meaning.

Disgruntled -> gruntled

Unhinged -> hinged

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#18

Post by masfuerte »

egypturnash wrote: post #15
Ajay-p wrote: post #7

I am struggling to believe all of this. It feels like a calendar that was used but then someone later filed it in with all of this artwork, and commentary after the fact. Recording events that already happened. If this was a desk calendar, someone would have noticed, and noticed the content. If it's true, it's a glimpse into the past and thinking of someone in a very important position during a very difficult time in…

You really think someone's gonna go back and do this for nine years of calendars? Look up something that happened every day to see if there's anything to make a doodle about? Imagine: It is 1981. You are working deep inside a bureaucracy. Social media does not exist, there is no equivalent to checking Hacker News for "a few minutes" and blowing an entire hour on it. Usenet barely exists - it was established last year…

You almost certainly didn't have a computer on your desk in 1981. The IBM PC was released in August.

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#19

Post by mikestew »

Ajay-p wrote: post #7

I am struggling to believe all of this. It feels like a calendar that was used but then someone later filed it in with all of this artwork, and commentary after the fact. Recording events that already happened. If this was a desk calendar, someone would have noticed, and noticed the content. If it's true, it's a glimpse into the past and thinking of someone in a very important position during a very difficult time in…

Ten minutes of viewing the “bullet journal” subreddit should convince you that, oh yes, it is probably very real. There’s an entire industry for this kind of stuff: highlighters, rubber stamps, fancy tape…

Re: A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)

#20

Post by sour-taste »

bee_rider wrote: post #17
JKCalhoun wrote: post #9

They would be better gruntled two years later since K.U. would win the NCAAA Tournament in 1987.

There should be a word for these back-formations that specifically come from cutting this prefix looking thing off the front of a word to invert their meaning. Disgruntled -> gruntled Unhinged -> hinged

What if we called them k formations, by applying the same rule we're trying to describe to the word backfoations?

Overwhelmed/underwhelmed -> whelmed Discombobulated -> combobulate Disghust -> ghust

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