Oh, I love this thread. But then I have read books on the history of secretarial and office work. Thank you so much OP, and to all the contributors of their office memories.
My first office job was a temporary post in a university alumni office in 1993 - actually, I'd done some work as part of business admin training before that. I'd previously learned to touch type though not fast or very well on a typewriter, I think in school holidays. Both those offices were computerised - WordPerfect in the first, I can't remember in the second as my job was data entry using specialist database software - records of former students who could be contacted, engaged and tapped for money - fundraising.
There were two secretaries and they did fairly traditional stuff though we had computers. I don't know if email was used for the work, possibly not very much because others wouldn't have had it. There must be loads of email now!
Then I did a really posh secretarial course and temped for 3 years, briefly in my hometown and then in London, then worked in the same council department for 14 years. Everywhere I worked used some sort of computers, but there was quite a variety of software - did anyone else use Officepower or Uniplex? My temporary jobs included an accountants, various solicitors' offices, a couple of banks including a private client firm founded in the 17th century and very much a family business, an architects pracitce and several local government and civil service offices. in 1996, I went from one council job in an office where we used a lot of internal email - external email was a few years later - to another where it was available but not in use - I had to ring another neighbourhood office to find out how I could get them to email me templates for something. In several offices I had to use a typewriter to complete forms.
In one civil service office I had to do a word count, divide it by 127 or some equally weird number and fill in a little form for each piece of work. The typists' office had the slowest computers in the building and we had macros to produce letters which took ages to produce something and then you'd discover a mistake and have to do it again - crediting the typists with the intelligence to amend/add specific information to a form letter would have been a lot faster - or giving them the same sort of computers as were being used by people who couldn't type.
Smoking - I've never smoked and some offices were non smoking but I worked in one where other secretaries would come to the office where I was working with a couple of others for a cigarette break, and another with a colleague smoking at her desk. But from 1995 I can only think of those two where that was the case. So glad that didn't continue. Office buildings still included smoking rooms for breaks.
When I started in my last long term job in 1998 we used faxes a lot, though I remember them being a novelty which was getting more popular during a postal strike in 1990. When I left, most of that use had been replaced by email. From 2006 to 2011, I worked for a blind solicitor and his job and support needs really changed - he still needed me to do some secretarial and some support work and to help read out old deeds and things, but he also used a voice reader - when I first began there, I wasn't working with him much but he had a full time reader who didn't do secretarial stuff and a shared team secretary.