What did we do deserve such a sunset yesterday? I couldn’t say. Maybe there was an extra ration of air pollution in the western sky. The photo doesn’t depict all the subtleties of the hues, but here it is anyway.
One more book from my shelf: This Wasn’t in the Job Description, a collection of Duffy comic strips by Bruce Hammond, published in 1983. I acquired it in Nashville ca. 1985, around the same time I was introduced to Life in Hell, a different sort of comic whose creator went on to other things.

Duffy is a pre-Dilbert office comic, beginning syndication in 1981 and petering out in the mid-1990s. “The strip lasted almost a decade and a half, at its most popular was claimed to be running in 90+ newspapers, even got the reprint book treatment once,” writes comic strip historian Allan Holtz (so it seems I have a copy of the only collection). “On the other hand, it is a strip that certainly did seem to fly under the radar for much of its existence…

“With most of the gags about office politics, technology, and upper management, you could think of this as a precursor to Dilbert, but I think that would be off-base. Duffy owed a little more, I think, to the style and gags of Jeff MacNelly’s Shoe. Take off the bird wings, and move the Treetops Tattler gang into a generic office setting, and you get close to the feel of Duffy.”

Mildly satiric, Duffy wasn’t groundbreaking or outrageously funny — I’m hard-pressed to think of many late 20th-century newspaper comics that are either — just consistently amusing, and not all comics are even that. The eponymous main character, the middle-aged and disheveled middle-manager Arthur Duffy, muddles through his days in the office of a company whose exact business is never specified, vexed by the heard but never seen company president G.W. and a dim-witted and sleazy colleague Miles. The other two main characters are women: Jessie, another middle manager, and Naomi, Duffy’s secretary, and Hammond’s a good deal more sympathetic to them than Scott Adams to his female characters.

Jessie: There’s a line on the budget sheet I don’t understand, Duffy.
Duffy: What’s that, Jessie?
Jessie: What does “ancillary administrative expense” mean?
Duffy: Slush fund.
—
Naomi: How can you moan about owing money, Duffy? You must make four times what I do.
Duffy: It’s a basic law of economics, Naomi. Debt is always greater than income.
—
Jessie: This is National Secretaries’ Week, Miles. Planning anything special for your secretary?
Miles: You must be kidding.
Jessie: Come on! Why not?
Miles: I don’t observe holidays invented by florists.

It’s interesting how dated some of it is after only 30 years. Desktop computers are new and threatening — at least to Duffy — there’s a series of strips about learning from Japanese management techniques, and there’s no talk of casual Friday, open-plan offices or cell phones. Jokes about incompetence in the C-suite are pretty much timeless, though.