A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018) • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

masfuerte wrote: post #18

egypturnash wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#22

Post by marcosdumay » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

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…

> someone would have noticed, and noticed the content

And you are assuming the calendar owner would care. Why exactly?

And yeah, it would be filled both before the facts as a reminder and after the facts as something to take the mind away from some incredibly boring meeting. I can easily imagine somebody doing this.

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

#23

Post by jprete » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:04 PM UTC

sour-taste wrote: post #20

bee_rider wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OT, but I looked up "whelmed" in after reading your comment and...we never really needed "overwhelmed" at all. Just plain "whelmed" seems bad enough.

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

#24

Post by bravetraveler » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:29 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #13

Schattenbaer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Mine aren't even color coded - imagine, yours but monochrome :|

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

#25

Post by washadjeffmad » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

tsunamifury wrote: post #11

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

They're military, so these "important events" would have been daily topical reports and were, at the time, already world news. There's also no reason to believe they'd only give themselves permission to write in each square during the 24 hour period of the corresponding day.

If Fridays are slow, catch up on the news, ink the notes you penciled in, and find some time to color them when you can. You've got the entire month - and that's a ton of time when you're not someone's productivity slave.

Also, notice the last week or two of each month gets sparser and less complete. That implies to me that they flipped the sheets and didn't go back to work on the old ones. If this were an art project, there wouldn't be a difference between the start and the end of the month.

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

#26

Post by ajcp » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:39 PM UTC

jprete wrote: post #23

sour-taste wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OT, but I looked up "whelmed" in after reading your comment and...we never really needed "overwhelmed" at all. Just plain "whelmed" seems bad enough.

I use "whelming" almost daily to denote something that I or the person I'm talking to expect to be over/underwhelming, but turns out not to be.

Them: "How'd you like that new burger joint Bad Jimmies? I heard it's amazing!"

Me: "Not bad, but I found their burgers to be...[0] whelming."

0. The pregnant pause-for-effect is very important here, since it makes even the use of "whelming" a whelming experience.

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

#27

Post by pimlottc » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:48 PM UTC

Is there a particular reason to believe that the unnamed employee was male? The article refers to them as "he" multiple times and compares them to a monk (traditionally male):

> Like a monk, he labored over his document every day, adding carefully crafted letters and elaborate drawings to what became, over nine years, a remarkably full chronicle of the decade.