[HN Gopher] A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar...
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A disgruntled federal employee's 1980s desk calendar (2018)
Author : jfax
Score : 120 points
Date : 2024-04-13 12:27 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (internationaltimes.it)
(TXT) w3m dump (internationaltimes.it)
| hmottestad wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240413123133/https://internati...
| bmacho wrote:
| Or
| https://archive.ph/oldest/https://internationaltimes.it/a-di...
| hmottestad wrote:
| archive.ph doesn't seem to work for me. Not managing to
| connect via https, but the server is responding to ping.
| _n_b_ wrote:
| If you use non-cloudflare DNS, it should work.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Ping seems to resolve fine. And I'm using the DNS from my
| ISP, which is definitely not related to cloudflare.
|
| I found out it work in firefox, so it must be something
| to do with Safari or the adblocker I'm using.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| Schattenbaer wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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!
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Mine aren't even color coded - imagine, yours but
| monochrome :|
| function_seven wrote:
| I color code mine. Yellow if I'm listed as an optional
| participant, blue if I'm required.
|
| I don't attend the yellow ones.
| bigEnotation wrote:
| How could you be a human being and not be small D disgruntled?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You're agreeing with me! I said 4/10! Moderate
| disgruntlement.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Rather a 0/10. He seems optimistic about Reagan, the US, Israel
| etc.
|
| 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?
| Ajay-p wrote:
| 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 world.
|
| But I can't quell this nagging doubt
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| woutersf wrote:
| 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.
| Isamu wrote:
| 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.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| The retrospective nature of knowing every important event and
| saying oh today was X seems improbable at best
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
| masfuerte wrote:
| You almost certainly didn't have a computer on your desk in
| 1981. The IBM PC was released in August.
| mikestew wrote:
| 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...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| They would be better gruntled two years later since K.U. would
| win the NCAAA Tournament in 1987.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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
| ch33zer wrote:
| 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
| jprete wrote:
| 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.
| ajcp wrote:
| 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.
| jki275 wrote:
| Danny Manning for President.
| cobbaut wrote:
| January 13 1984 he switched to using Debian :)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| A man ahead of his time :-)
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "He" comes from the description in the original posting on the
| rare books site selling these:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221205191022/https://bostonrar...
| - possibly they knew exactly who it was from?
|
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| A neopagan in 1987? That's not so likely.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This is not disgruntled but bored.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Well it already said federal employee, so...
| lolinder wrote:
| Hugged to death, archive here:
|
| https://archive.ph/REbFy
| raheemm wrote:
| He is far from disgruntled. He seems like someone who enjoyed his
| work and his life. Clickbait article but I guess it worked.
| Aloha wrote:
| This appears to be the original source -
| https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/13/a-disgruntled...
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Looks like the page is currently being hugged to death so I'm not
| sure if this is actually related to OP, but...
|
| 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.
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(page generated 2024-04-13 23:00 UTC)