I work in one of those offices where various changes and restructures see you change desks 2 – 12 times per year. During one of these moves, a small whiteboard about as wide as two monitors, was left behind.
This happened to be one of those rare moves to “The Good Desks”, and mine had enough room to keep it on the desk next to my monitor without blocking anyone’s view or anything. So that became its new home. (Also how I got my second monitor at work has a very similar story to this…). At first it was just handy for impromptu brainstorming and such. Then I decided something cool I learned listening to a podcast on Youtube needed to go up and did this….
(The podcast was a Nerdist Podcast and you can listen to it on Youtube here.)
Soon, random trivia was going up. Then I started finding out things like, today is Talk Like A Pirate Day! I looked in to it and most people simply would not believe how many different days there are. So I listed as many of these as I could find daily with the trivia on the board. Soon people were chasing me up if I didn’t update new entries daily first thing. I had to give prepared updates for the period I was on holidays recently. Some people come from other floors to read it. Today, we did World Food Day by having a shared lunch with the team, everyone bringing in different dishes. There was Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Sri Lankan, and English dishes in there. Also on Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work Day we had pretty strong participation where people brought in their teddies and chatted about their teddy bear stories. Where they came from, their names, which teddies were married….. Yeah I wouldn’t call where I work dull.
At any rate, I figured I would work on a list of daily events here to share. I am not including the obvious things that appear on most calendars like public holidays, and the collection is by no means comprehensive. If I included every disease or remembrance day for some tragic event in history, it would be a list with a very different tone. I’m more interested in things that are wierd, relatable, fun or will just get you thinking. Since this year is already shrinking fast (OMG its only 10 weeks to 2015! Probably less by the time I finish working on this and finally publish it) I will make a 2015 calendar of events. Actually, after reviewing the work needed to prepare a comprehensive 2015 post, I will instead prepare daily posts with the 2015 daily events list tag and Calendar category. So if you want to follow, you have a reason for popping back and checking for new entries.
Disclaimer: I have not verified the source of much of the trivia. I have seen things listed on the web as trivia that have been proven fake, but even with some vetting I wouldn’t put more faith in its accuracy than I would put in the accuracy of a Wikipedia page. This is also true in terms of the events, though most of them I have seen from multiple sources.
Posts are scheduled to commence from 1 Jan 2015.