For those of you who worked in an office in 1960's - 1980's

The internal post was amazing, though. Very regular and efficient.

And we had a stationery office, which you could either go to, in person, and put in orders (filled out on a carboned sheet) or use the internal post and have your items delivered by the internal post.

This is a fun thread. I remember subsidised canteens. My strongest memories were of the amount of filing (of paper copies). Everything had to be kept, in multiple location for multiple copies, for six years. My job seemed to be a circle of feeding this filing monster with new paper offerings, and slewing the six-year detritus.

First job was in wine company office 1984.

Customer called in and placed the order over the phone and you write it down on a manual order sheet.
Then you transferred the formation to a manual spreadsheet in pencil. Only at he ending the working day after checked by the supervisor, you totalled it up in ink.
Then you typed the order details into the telex machine to the warehouse to despatch.
Then you have the carbon copy of the telex, with the copy of the order stapled to it, to the computer lady. She sat in a separate air conditioned room wth a hard drive the size of a small car. She typed the stock figures in to the one and only computer.

We all smoked at our desks and had two hour lunch breaks down the pub on Fridays.

When I started my last job in 2002 I was gobsmacked to discover that every letter in or out was recorded.
I happened to say jokingly one day that I was worried about Winchester and was asked why. Said we'd not written to them for a while .. at this point the office manager did concede they were wasting time every day recording all post in and out.
However during a recent restructure a small out in the field office was closed. It was discovered that the admin there had been diligently writing out whole answerphone messages (word for word) into a book, her manager then signed and dated these when read.

I worked in advertising at my first job. It seemed to involve much more time drinking than working.

We had one PC in our department with Wordperfect on it. You could type up documents but couldn't see what they looked like before printing as the display font was fixed and you had to put codes in to make it bigger/smaller bold etc. Oh the memories!

LoniceraJaponica, or may i call you Honeysuckle? Thanks for posting a pic, as I can remember them but not what they were called.

I remember having a desk, with drawers. Everyone had their own desk. With your own crap on it, photos of the children, perfume, food. In/Out/pending paper trays. Everyone had something pending from 1975 that they were still working on. Your friends and family could come into the office and wait for you.

You could keep all sorts of non-work related stuff in the drawers - sanitary towels, more food.

Now we have hot-desking and clear-desk policies

I was in a shop earlier this week where the assistant used an order book with carbon paper to write my receipt!

When our NHS dept moved to recording test reports on PC, I managed to delete a whole month's worth of test results and at the time no one thought to back work up. I was not popular.
The internal post system was very efficient and you saw lots of medical secretaries stalking the corridors with with an armful of case notes or sheets of paper, stopping when the chance arose for a chat.

Every first of the month at the bank the statements would arrive. A pile about two feet tall, all connected together with perforations. they all had to be ripped, folded and stuffed into envelopes, franked and taken to the post office.

Now it just seems but then it was just the norm and a job that had to be done by the office junior within deadlines.

Feeling soooooo nostalgic reading this thread.

I worked somewhere in the mid 90s that had a typing pool in Bournemouth. Every day a van drove down stuff to be typed/amended etc and then you waited for it to come back. We were in HQ in Manchester.

Gah - I should add that everyone had a file too where their returns, letters etc were stored, and they were sent off with the concards.

I worked for HMRC from 1975. Every PAYE employee had a concard about 10" by 7", on which was recorded absolutely everything about them, covering about 7 years?.
When a person changed jobs their concard had to be sent to the tax office dealing with their new employer.
Each tax officer had an allocation of around 3000 employees to look after - so 3000 concards in drawers at their desk, in hods.

Every day new concards would arrive to be filed away, and requests received for concards to be removed and sent by mail all over the country.

No calculators (weren't commonly available or affordable for a few more years). To work out tax we had sets of tables to work it all out by hand.....

When I look back it was an amazing system and worked extremely well. Every taxpayer knew the name of the person who was entirely responsible for dealing with their income tax, and their individual phone number........

Memos that were typed up by an office manager or secretary and arrived once a day were commonplace, and I worked for a firm where one of the subsidiaries seemed to send hundreds a week. Used to dread the c11am arrival of them.

Beatrice

We had lots of "pending" files.

I had a summer job cleaning offices in the early 90s. All the office staff seemed to smoke at their desks and it was utter carnage! Burn marks, ash, fag ends all over the place. Hard to image why it was every allowed.

I started working for a Local Authority in 2000 which was mostly like going back to the 80s I remember one of the older senior managers used to get his secretary to print out his e-mails, he'd hand write a reply on them and get her to type it out and send it back!

I know how you all use these things to get stuff done but I want to know ... how bloody long did t take? Surely the output went at a snails pace ??

I was told off for wearing trousers in the late 1980's. When my enlightened self relied "you can't say that" my boss replied "Oh yes I can if you want to keep your job"

Also we used to have to physically take the huge franking machine in it's entirety to the main Post Office to have money put on it. We wrote them a cheque.

Yellow pages was used a lot.

I have never worked in an office I was a nurse but up untill 12 or so years ago all our patients notes were handwritten I was a mental health nurse so our patients generally had various professionals involved ie psychiatrist , CPN in patient staff social workers etc and everyone had their own set of paper written notes and then they developed a computerised system and each professional had access to one central electronic notes it was so much easier and you could see who had done what.

I worked in a bank when I left school. Customer's bank balances were on microfiche that were delivered in the internal mail every morning. So that was the day's balance, til the next one arrived.

Some customer's had all their cheques back with their statements so had to go rummaging for them every day.

The fax machine was used a lot, and IIRC the photocopier involved two sheets of paper and a pink sheet in between.

Adding machines had a paper roll. I can still use a numeric keyboard very fast without having to look.

My mum worked at the Gas board through out the 80,s and early 90,s she talked a lot about VDU,s visual display units ?She used to work in accounts so she would sort out people's gas bills this was a time when you could phone a local number and talk to someone in person about your bill imagine that

I started work in the civil service in 1975.
Everything was on paper. Files, card indexes, notebooks.
We spoke to people on the phone a lot more, actually this was often more efficient than e mail in a large organisation where people are bombarded with hundreds of emails.
Information was circulated in a folder and everyone had to sign to say they had read it.

I had to hand write reports, decisions letters and briefs, then send them to the typists. They would be back on my desk within an hour.

People smoked at their desk. My boss smoked a pipe . The whole office was a blue fug.

I started my first job in 1999 and remember being perplexed when being asked by my boss to send a memo to someone in the office. Why not just send an email

I had just graduated from university and had been used to communicating by email for a couple of years from the campus computer rooms.

I guess the late 90s was very much the cusp of paper vs electronic communication methods.

Mid 80's, worked for mortgage broker of high street bank. Everything was paper recorded, so customers would phone us for a balance etc and we'd rummage through paper index cards to find their details. Unbelievable!

I also remember the "computer room " it was a very mysterious place that only a select few were allowed to enter. I never made it in there

Also remember being completely flummoxed by the fax machine!