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

[Spooky23]

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]

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.

[rightbyte]

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?

[bigEnotation]

How could you be a human being and not be small D disgruntled?

[bandyaboot]

The phrase “going postal” was coined for the truly 10/10 disgruntled government employee.

[Aloha]

This appears to be the original source - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/13/a-disgruntled...

[dang]

Thanks! We've changed to that from https://internationaltimes.it/a-disgruntled-federal-employee....

[ugh123]

which also notes that this was recently sold for $5500 via https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/1980s-illustrated-cold-...

[raheemm]

He is far from disgruntled. He seems like someone who enjoyed his work and his life. Clickbait article but I guess it worked.

[JKCalhoun]

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

[jki275]

Danny Manning for President.

[bee_rider]

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

[seattle_spring]

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.

[nateroling]

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.

[cobbaut]

January 13 1984 he switched to using Debian :)

[HeyLaughingBoy]

A man ahead of his time :-)

[pan69]

Or unboxed his Dreamcast. :)

[mytailorisrich]

This is not disgruntled but bored.

[steve1977]

Well it already said federal employee, so…

[theodric]

"During the eighties, a nameless Cold Warrior grew frustrated in his job"

And now we know he got his period on the 15th, as well. Did the author not read each cell systematically?

[andrelaszlo]

I'm curious about the two numbers recorded every second Saturday:

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!

[fsckboy]

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.

[fl7305]

Is it some kind of way to keep track of flex time or similar?

[pimlottc]

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]

“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.

[nocoiner]

There appears to be a significant other named Liz in the mix, and a reference to a wedding anniversary, so a male author seems probable to me.

[smabie]

I mean you can obviously tell immediately from the hand writing

[mc32]

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.

Maybe it was some one else later who wrote that.

[bluedemon]

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.

On rare occassions, I still kind of do it.

[mike-the-mikado]

In the 1980s, I would doodle at work when my mind was taking a break. A helpful diagram might get embellished.

Nowadays, I would be finding some excuse to check the internet. And I'm less likely to have scrap paper to hand.

[susiecambria]

> First class postage increased to 18¢

Wish we had that now!

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Using CPI, $0.18 in 1980 is $0.68 now, so you have better than that now.

[hmottestad]

https://web.archive.org/web/20240413123133/https://internati...

[bmacho]

Or https://archive.ph/oldest/https://internationaltimes.it/a-di...

[lolinder]

Hugged to death, archive here:

https://archive.ph/REbFy

[Ajay-p]

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

[mikestew]

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…

[woutersf]

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.

[egypturnash]

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.

[marcosdumay]

> 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.

[tsunamifury]

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

[andyjohnson0]

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.