End of the World or Lazy Design Intern?

The world will end on December 21, 2012.

Well, that’s according to believers that the Maya’s “Long Count” calendar predicts the end of civilization, and some killer Holiday parties, as we know it.

There’s some pretty crazy stuff that lines up on that date. December 21st at 11:11 p.m. marks the exact date and time that the sun will be aligned with the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years. 26,000 YEARS! Do you know what’s about 26,000 light years away from earth? The galactic center. And do you know what’s at the galactic center? The Milky Way and a black hole 4 million times the mass of our sun.

Let me break that down for you. Astronomers and scientists with really big telescopes are seeing what happened in the Milky Way 26,000 years ago. So on the 26,000th anniversary of the alignment of the earth, sun and Milky Way, 12/21/2012, the sun will be blocking our view of the ginormus black hole as it sucks us into deep space. Well, at least that’s what I would be writing about if I had a book deal and a deadline. But since I don’t, here’s another theory a little more coincidental.

Have you ever designed a calendar? I mean all 365 days, or 366 if you were lucky to work on one for 2012? It’s a pain! Just imagine designing one that had to include over 5000 days with no numbers. Instead of easy strokes of the modern numerical system, you had 20 complex symbols that represented each day. And by the way, computers don’t exist so you have to carve these out of stone.

All I’m saying is if I were the ancient design intern sitting in the dark with only a few candles to light a gigantic hunk of stone and my bloody knuckles, I would have used every ounce of persuasion I had to get the art director guards to understand that a calendar is just as good with 5,126 days as it would be with 7,200. “Hey fellas, we’re not going to be around that long anyways. Am I right or what?” Not exactly the same as discussing the nuances of sans vs. serif with the higher-ups. Like most art directors they would have given me a death stare and walked away. In this case I probably would have gotten a promotion as the next sacrifice to the gods. But do you think they would have finished the job for me? Heck no!

They would have gone to the creative director and said the calendar is finished. Thus giving us a calendar that was only 5,126 days long. Merely coincidence that it falls on the same day as this crazy alignment with a gigantic black hole some 26,000 light years away.

The moral of the story: don’t let tedious design work get you down. It could always be worse. Your laziness may just be interpreted as the end of the world a few 1000 years down the road.