The Legacy of the One-Minute Cartoon

About 18 years ago, I worked as an audio-video technician for a large Canadian university. Looking back now, I have to admit it was one of the best jobs I've had: the work was diverse and interesting, my co-workers were all superfun drinking pals, and the environment was quite casual.

I would kick off many a shift with a one-minute cartoon. I did this purely to entertain myself and several of my co-workers when we gathered at Master Control to organize our equipment deliveries for the shift. Each doodle was drawn with a black Sharpie on a 4" x 5" piece of scrap paper, and was always created in one minute or less. Sometimes my colleagues would give me a topic, sometimes not, but they were always juvenile, silly, and very crudely drawn. Each finished drawing was tacked to the wall of the control room until it eventually evolved into a sort of patchwork quilt wallpaper. Of course, I assumed they were torn down and tossed out after I moved on to a different job.

Then last week I bumped into Tony, a cherished friend of many years and the Master of Master Control, still employed with the University. We went for a few pints and he told me he would e-mail me some jokes that I'd really enjoy. A few days later, I received a series of scanned illustrations -- Tony had in fact saved the one-minute cartoons from extinction and had scanned them for posterity! I'm very grateful to him for having the foresight to preserve a little piece of our work-art history. Some of them are dated and a bit cliché almost 2 decades later, but they really cracked us up back then.

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