A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)(theparisreview.org) |
A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)(theparisreview.org) |
A truly miserable government worker has a daily countdown to retirement. At extreme levels, down to the hour.
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!
Unless you count cheering your measly 5 day vacation as 'disgruntled' I would say he is not disgruntled at all.
Rather a refreshing bit of hopefull and cares?
> On January 20, 1983 we read “THE HUMP: TWO YEARS OF REAGAN DONE AND TWO MORE TO YEARS GO.” He was of course to be disappointed in this, and Election Day 1984 is colored a somber black. In April 1986, however, the calendars begin a month-by-month countdown: “Thirty-four months of Reagan left!!!”
Disgruntled -> gruntled
Unhinged -> hinged
Overwhelmed/underwhelmed -> whelmed Discombobulated -> combobulate Disghust -> ghust
My father was very much in the category of “disgruntled federal employee” during his employment with the USGS. I’ll spare most of the details, but the most ridiculous thing I remember was his screensaver showing the countdown, in days, until retirement. He had this going for at least 15 years prior to his retirement.
Can you imagine going into work every day and seeing a countdown with nearly 5000 days on it? Absolutely nuts to me.
And now we know he got his period on the 15th, as well. Did the author not read each cell systematically?
242/119, 246/85, 183/78, 187/84, 207/76, 115/197, 121/201, ...
Maybe it's obvious to Americans? Is it related to sports? I sure hope it's not their blood pressure!
the other comment about flextime, maybe, could be "hours of holiday time accrued" and it goes up and down because he spends it? Maybe a military person would know better, maybe in some subreddit.
> 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.
That said, I got a femme vibe off the handwriting too. And the inclusion of cartouches around the lunar phase drawings plus a lovingly illustrated entry for Samhain suggests the artist is a neopagan of some kind, which could be a slight tell for femininity. Maybe. Depends on the coven really. Which they were apparently a part of, the full sales post includes an image with a little pile of coven newsletters, some of which are in “paste-up form” which suggests they were participating in the time honored tradition of using the office copier on the sly.
Maybe it was some one else later who wrote that.
On rare occassions, I still kind of do it.
Nowadays, I would be finding some excuse to check the internet. And I'm less likely to have scrap paper to hand.
Wish we had that now!
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 world.
But I can't quell this nagging doubt
I've been trying to find this concept for the past 2 or three years.
I remember seeing this years and years ago and it was interesting.
I used to be compulsive about making things. Way back when they still issued business cards I had to make geometric constructions with them.
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.
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.
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.
Nicely done, though, however it originated: I wish I could letter and doodle so neatly.
We lost something with Outlook for everything.
It wasn't cheap, but still not a huge investment for a small company.
The person with the calendar seems to have worked at a large defense related operation?
It wouldn't have been a financial stretch for them to have VT-100 terminals on their desks connected to VAX 11/780 superminicomputers as early as 1978.
I don’t attend the yellow ones.
Also, the 1st of January is described as "civil new year", which implies there's some other new year on a different day, which could be samhain.
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.
I found out it work in firefox, so it must be something to do with Safari or the adblocker I'm using.
Second guess: Liz is female author's father's second wife. Ailing, but finishing college as an older student.
Absolutely nothing about the content, lettering, or drawing suggests a male author to me. FWIW!
Maybe Liz is her younger half-sister from a temporarily estranged parent. :)
I realize I'm plumbing the depths of statistical likelihood to support my intuition of a female author.
Two other things occur to me. In the 1980s, there was a wider variety of what was considered "ordinary" in the expression of stereotypical male traits within gendered males. It was much less expected for any in the gamut to follow a non-stereotypical path, of course, and for better or worse.
But more directly relevant, the author is "anonymous" but certainly not "unknown", so it probably makes sense to assume that the auction house / article writer got it right in the first place!
So the author was introduced to Liz on 1978-01-21, and married someone on 1979-05-05. It's possible that's Liz, but that's fairly quick, even for the 70s.