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!
> 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!!!”
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.
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.
Software calendars are so poor compared to this. There’s no concept of importance, of impact, of life. Just times and titles, every one equivalent. Digital calendars have hardly evolved since the palm pilot.
intriguing... I'm American and I remember those days, nothing comes to mind. "Every two weeks" sounds likely paycheck related though, but for instance those don't sound like hours worked or anything like that.
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.
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.
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.
Also: A man openly celebrating International Women's Day in 1981, while not impossible, is certainly unlikely. Similarly, "Nice Day With Liz" on a Sunday, seems like mentioning a platonic event. A man opening having female friends and meeting them 1-to-1 on a Sunday in 1981? Again, not impossible, but another point suggesting a female author.
I would wager that Liz is the female author's younger sister. In the calendar period, the author turns 32 and has an 8th wedding anniversary, meanwhile Liz graduates with a 4.0 GPA.
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.
In the US Federal Government we also have to deal with the fiscal new year which starts in October for some bizarre reason (yearly budgets go from October 1st to September 30).
There is something odd about this persons numbers. It’s the 80s and on occasion the number zero is written with a slash through it, but most of the time not. I’m not sure there was a prevalence to distinguish 0s from Os in type back then.
It was not uncommon to draw a line through the zero to distinguish it from the letter ‘O’. Similarly, a slash was often added to the letter ‘Z’ to prevent confusion with the number 2.
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.
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…
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.
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.
You might well have had a terminal on your desk, because that had been an increasingly common thing for over a decade by 1981. But probably nothing fun on it in a government/military setting.
My dad had a computer on his desk in 1979. It was a Z80 based business computer with a monochrome monitor, 5.25" floppy drive, and a dot matrix printer.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
A truly miserable government worker has a daily countdown to retirement. At extreme levels, down to the hour.