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The Plate Archive23 charts

Office Life: Charts About Work, Meetings and Clients

The collection where the archive's borrowed business idiom stops being borrowed.

Twenty-three charts about work, and they are the ones where the archive’s whole device collapses in the best possible way. Everywhere else on this site, drawing a joke as a pie chart is a borrowing: the format belongs to quarterly reporting and has been requisitioned for a lyric. Here the format belongs to the subject. A chart about a project schedule looks exactly like a project schedule because that is what the person drawing it had open in another window.

The constraint everybody states and nobody accepts

A client can have their project _____ is the collection’s centrepiece: the fast, cheap, good trilemma, drawn as a diagram, with a blank in the title so the reader completes it. It is linked from two sites, and it is the one chart here that has been reinvented independently by every agency that ever existed.

Project Accomplishment Schedule plots the same relationship over time rather than as a choice. The Customer Is Always… answers a slogan with data. Corporate Graphic Design Guide is a chart about the visual language it is drawn in, which puts it half in this collection and half in the meta one.

Meetings, measured

Meeting Length vs. Will To Live names both of its variables in its title and needs no units to make the point. Its image is not among those recovered. Things discussed at meetings is the pie version of the same finding. The Brain At Work plots attention rather than agenda, and How Happy I Am With My Job is linked from two sites — plotting a single value that most respondents would rather not state out loud.

Occupation Vs. Wake Up Time is the most nearly-real chart in the collection: a handful of occupations set against the hour each is assumed to start, drawn without a source, and plausible enough that you have to remind yourself nobody measured it.

The boss, and the screen

The chance my Boss will walk into my office vs. What’s on my screen is the archive’s cleanest statement of an inverse relationship. Amount of times my boss uses the F word is a frequency count. Shit I’ll Get Fired For is a risk register. Together they describe a workplace entirely through its hazards, which is how workplaces are in fact described by the people in them.

Work from the staff side of a classroom

Five entries here are about teaching rather than being taught. Time spent grading student essays. is linked from two sites, and plots a distribution every marker recognises. I am most likely to go to Professor/TA office hours when… is drawn from the student’s position but is about the staff member’s day. School Nurse Levels of Care by Illness or Injury is a triage chart, and it is funny for exactly the reason real triage charts are not.

Whats Getting Me Through Medical School and What I learned in Accounting Class vs Level of Importance sit at the boundary between this collection and School and Study; both are about training for work rather than the work itself.

What the collection is worth

Thirty-one sites still link to it across twenty-three charts, and the highest single count belongs to Amazon customer reviews with four, a chart about the distribution of star ratings, which is a chart about how customers actually communicate. The rest are ones and twos. This is not a collection that travelled widely; it is one that circulated inside the places it describes, forwarded between people who had the same afternoon.

Charts here
23
Images recovered
12
Published as plates
0
Referring domains
31
First posted
Aug 2008
Last posted
Sep 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    The Brain At Work

    · Drawn by s1ren

  2. A2

    Corporate Graphic Design Guide

    · Drawn by SilentKnight · image not recovered

  3. A3

    What I Imagine My Cat Is Doing When I’m At Work

    · Drawn by Betsy G

  4. A4

    Words police officers might understand during the course of an arrest and the likelihood thereof

    · Drawn by ron a · image not recovered

  5. A5

    Amazon customer reviews

    · Drawn by Oli Redman · 4 domains still link here · image not recovered

  6. A6

    Whats Getting Me Through Medical School

    · Drawn by Dragonfly Initiative

  7. A7

    The chance my Boss will walk into my office vs. What’s on my screen

    · image not recovered

  8. A8

    What I learned in Accounting Class vs Level of Importance

    · Drawn by killum · 2 domains still link here

  9. A9

    I am most likely to go to Professor/TA office hours when…

    · Drawn by lonelyjew14

  10. A10

    A client can have their project _____

    · Drawn by hiropendragon · 2 domains still link here

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Amount of times my boss uses the F word

    · image not recovered

  13. B2

    Time spent grading student essays.

    · 2 domains still link here

  14. B3

    How Happy I Am With My Job

    · 2 domains still link here

  15. B4

    School Nurse Levels of Care by Illness or Injury

    · Drawn by dcpdpayne · image not recovered

  16. B5

    The Customer Is Always…

    · Drawn by starcommandjenn · image not recovered

  17. B6

    My Job

    · Drawn by khi_lin24 · image not recovered

  18. B7

    Occupation Vs. Wake Up Time

    · Drawn by sarahrockel

  19. B8

    Project Accomplishment Schedule

    · Drawn by Bailiwick2002

  20. B9

    Lesbrarians

    · Drawn by todd · 2 domains still link here

  21. B10

    Meeting Length vs. Will To Live

    · image not recovered

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Do you have homework?

    · Drawn by Isabel

  24. C2

    Amount of danger vs job

    · image not recovered

  25. C3

    MASH MASH MASH MASH MASH

    · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is in the Office Life collection?

Twenty-three charts about paid work, drawn between August 2008 and September 2010: meetings, clients, bosses, deadlines, and the specific arithmetic of a job that is measured in reports.

Why does this material suit the chart format so well?

Because the joke and the medium come from the same place. A chart about a project schedule, drawn in the visual language of a project schedule, is not a parody of the format, it is the format used honestly for once.

What is the client triangle chart?

A client can have their project _____ , from December 2008. It plots the fast-cheap-good constraint that every service business states and no client accepts, and it is linked from two sites.

Are the teaching charts here or under School and Study?

Teaching from the staff side is here — grading essays, office hours, the school nurse. Charts drawn from the student’s side are in the School and Study collection.

Why do some entries have no image?

All the original chart images sat on a service that now returns an error, so each was recovered from a surviving copy. Where no copy survived, the entry keeps its title, its date and its address.