What was the norm when you started work

[harknesswitch]

Inspired by another thread, what things were the norm when you started work that would now be unbelievable.

When my Mum told her employer she was pregnant, in 1972, they sacked her

When I started work you could smoke at your desk and we were even given branded ashtrays

No email, everything was printed out by a work processor and filled in by hand. We had one of those personalised ink stamps to use which we signed so they knew who had filled in the form

[B1rdflyinghigh]

We used to give out small bits of equipment as all complex patients were in care homes.
All patient records were written on paper.
All leavers were dunked in the patient's bath which was filled with anything you could think of.

[Goldrill]

I had a weekend/holiday job in a garden centre cafe when I was 15 (early 90s). I was good at it, so I got left to run it on busy weekends so my boss could have the weekend off! Cooking full roast dinners and everything!

It was fantastic experience though; 15 year olds are a lot more competent than they are given credit for.

[Cruddles]

Love this thread. I started working in 1994 as a bank teller for the largest bank in Australia. They had started moving from government owned to privatisation in 1990 so when i joined it was still very unionised and some old fashioned set ups, but times were soon to change.

In Australia you'd get "roster days off", which was a day off per month on top of your annual leave. It was standard in unionised jobs.

As mentioned up thread, we used to get staff circulars with a list of names stapled to the front, when you read it you crossed your name off and passed it to someone who'd not read it.

One of the circulars was the job vacancies. I used to look at bank teller jobs from all around Australia and wonder what it would be like to live in those far flung towns. I was only 18 and barely out of school so didn't have the confidence to apply. The older staff always said to wait for the vacancies in Tennant Creek or Alice Springs branches. They would send you for two years, put you up in staff quarters, non stop parties. Plus you were in the proper outback, it sounded like the wild west. Only for the young and energetic.

All employees were graded so you knew what you could apply for, as each job was set at a grade. I realised quickly i didn't want to be a teller so i looked for head office work. I got my first proper office job. It consisted of arriving at my desk in the morning to a dot matrix printed report about a foot high. I had to pull it apart into sections for various staff and departments. I would then walk around 4 stories of a building delivering the reports. I would then walk around in the afternoon to collect the same reports after they'd been reviewed. The reports were then filed away. There was a lot of filing in those days. You would walk into the filing room, the shelves would be on rails and you would turn massive wheels to move them to the side.

When i think back then it was how you could get your foot in the door easily. I started working in banking 5 days after high school finished. 27 years later i have a comfortable (but extremely dull) middle management job at a city firm. Now days to get in you need a decent result from a decent university, even operations roles. There's no foot in the door jobs, admin roles are almost job existent. And if i did try to take on a school leaver HR or upper management would block it. Everything is too serious now

[Onlinedilema]

Yes to the fax machines with the shiny paoer. It came out rolled up and you had to use a paperweight to hold it down to straighten it out.

[Imnothereforthedrama]

Some of these ,
My first full time job in late 90’s was in a very male dominated place it was a market wholesalers and I used to walk through in the morning with wolf whistles I hated it .
Smoking in the office , 1 shared computer that 2 people worked on at once and one person would shout the account numbers and the other would type . We all had one of those calculators with the till roll to add up the daily sales .
A few years ago I took a job and they handed me one of those calculators. I was like I use excel I used those calculators 20+ years ago but they were practically insisting. Some companies don’t like change, I didn’t stay there very long .

[Nandakanda]

Huge manufacturing plant in the Midlands in 1977.

A bit of backstabbing but most people were friendly and kind. Many of the older blokes had been in the war and had horror stories although they generally didn't talk about it.

Works bar and social club both open at lunch time with some daily regulars. Staff canteen and also a batch bar serving incredible bacon batches in the morning.

Lots of wolf whistles etc if a woman went on the shop floor, but similar comments and remarks to blokes going in certain offices. It was generally good natured and there were many couples getting together and getting married in addition to a fair amount of "hanky panky". No skirts only rules, although older staff had firm ideas on what constituted proper attire.

Lots of pranks and tomfoolery. There was a way to jump in on internal phone calls, so you could drop the odd arse or willy into somebody else's phone call.

Unions were strong and working conditions good for the time, although relations later deteriorated.

Young people could buy their own house although multiple property ownership was virtually unknown. You could get a job with 4-5 'O' levels and further training was available. Degrees were not normal and I really do wonder what useful training modern degrees actually provide.

The past was definitely a different country, but there was so much good stuff going on.

[TheSongOfTheSea]

We used to do loads of coke. Mountains and mountains of coke.

[TitsOot4Xmas]

Haven’t RTFT but 1994, aged 15/16 it was normal for (young female) waitresses to get shut in the fridge/freezer by a (male) chef so that our nipples would get hard. They said it would get us bigger tips. (Ha ha.)

Oh, and being told by pervy older (male) boss to “get your tits oot for Xmas”.

[Lexilooo]

Dictaphones with little tapes, and hard copies printed in duplicate.

Having to wear a dark skirt suit with tights and heels for court. We could wear trouser suits in the office, but not at court. No sandals ever and tights were compulsory.

Secretaries and receptionists calling the lawyers Mr...... Or Mrs........

[BoomBoomsCousin]

I joined the police in the early 90s. As part of the uniform we were issued with a small handbag and a tiny truncheon that fit in it!

[LadyDanburysCane]

Where I work now we have only just got rid of the signing in book.

We still have one in case we have to evacuate - it’s just a tick in and out though, no times are recorded.

[Sparklingbrook]

There was almost a paternalistic approach from the Bank to its staff.
Promotions were frequent and if you were bright you could whizz through the grades

Very true at the bank I worked at. you didn't have to apply for a promotion, you worked really hard, proved your worth and up the grades you went. Day release to college every Monday to get the banking exams and further promotion awaited.

[Onlinedilema]

Where I work now we have only just got rid of the signing in book. Apparently the manager wants to cling into it to check up on staff.
I remember the 2 coffee breaks. Nobody ever had a drink unless it was coffee break or lunch and nobody ate lunch at their desk.

[CounsellorTroi]

Also as others have said, smoking in the office and it being fine to go back to the office a bit tipsy after a team lunch, people just laughed indulgently . Noone thought it was a sacking offence unless you were falling down drunk every week or something

Yes I remember once it was noticed that a colleague hadn't been seen for a while, someone went to look for him and he was asleep on the toilet.

[bumblingbovine49]

80s in a data processing dept for a market research company...

Large boxes of completed paper questionnaires manually being entered using date entry software to large mainframe computers by banks of fast typing data entry operators.

Then the data was printed out onto 80 column paper cards with numbers 1-9, X in each column with holes punched in specific places to represent the answer for each question.

These cards were delivered to the ' processing' dept where they were fed in via a machine that converted the holes into computer data. The data then was edited for date entry errors and then converted to data tables in large printouts on white and green stripped folded paper . The relevant data was selected and manually retyped in reports and presentations

A paper survey of a couple hundred people always took weeks and usually several months to design conduct and analyse.

Nowadays we have online surveys which take a few days to design, collect responses and analyse

Also as others have said, smoking in the office and it being fine to go back to the office a bit tipsy after a team lunch, people just laughed indulgently . Noone thought it was a sacking offence unless you were falling down drunk every week or something

[Zippea]

Lunch and two tea breaks (the tea breaks were written into my contracts!)
Fax machines
Smoking was acceptable but only on one particular landing with the window open

[ScienceSensibility]

Lots of former bank staff on this thread, hi all.

I worked at Nat West International Division in the early 80s and remember so many of these practices,
The signing in book in the morning, which was taken away at five to nine and if you arrived later than that you had to go to a manager to sign in!


Overtime only accrued in full half hours, so if you didn’t balance and had to stay past 5pm, the supervisor would be desperate to get you out by 5.25.

Personal bank accounts were regularly scrutinised and you had to apply to Personnel to be allowed a credit card.

I had to fight to get support to do the Institute of Bankers exams, but male staff were offered day release automatically.

Incoming documents and post were methodically recorded by hand in huge ledgers. All letters had file copies plus ‘day’ copies which went round in a folder for all managers to see and sign for.

Nat West had a fantastic social organisation back then, bank teams for every sport and time off if you made it to regional level finals.

Every procedure possible was covered by National Books of Instruction. The ‘S’ book was for Staff and covered all personal matters.

Fantastic profit shares pro rata your salary and brilliant final salary pension.

Strict dress codes but also culture of pub and wine bar lunches and everyone drank alcohol at lunch!

We had a 20 min coffee break in the morning and a whole lunch hour. No one ever had lunch at their desk, we had a subsidised staff restaurant with excellent quality food.

There was almost a paternalistic approach from the Bank to its staff.
Promotions were frequent and if you were bright you could whizz through the grades.

Loved it. Very fond memories.

[flashylamp]

EastEnders had a wine bar, The Dagmar, back in the 80s. I thought that's when they grew in popularity with the 'yuppies'

[EversoDelighted]

Yes, I know of a wine bar that's been going since at least the 1980s and there was one in my small town when we moved here 20 years ago. I agree that drinking wine in pubs was not common back then though.

[BettyCarver]

3 month maternity leave!

[CounsellorTroi]

Fax paper was that slimy stuff for a while wasn't it.

Before the advent of plain paper faxes fax paper came on a roll and the fax was all curly. I also remember the old analogue faxes where it could take numerous attempts to get a fax of more than one page through as some of the pages were illegible due to some sort of interference on the phone line.

[Gwenhwyfar]

"In fact underage pub-going was the norm in my town - we were regularly in them on the weekends from around 14/15?

There was always 'that' pub that you knew you'd get served in! - and our wine bar was one of them!

Shocking to think of it now!"

That was normal where I lived to. We went clubbing at 15. The club was at a hotel so I told my parents I was going to a disco/gig.
I remember a policeman coming into a pub where my friend's mum was working and she just told him we were not underage.

[CandyLeBonBon]

Quite ahead of its time to have had wine bars I think. They still don't exist in smaller towns and even asking for wine in a pub was considered a bit posh until the early 2000s.

We definitely had a wine bar in my town in the 80s. I was a regular (and also underage! ).

In fact underage pub-going was the norm in my town - we were regularly in them on the weekends from around 14/15?

There was always 'that' pub that you knew you'd get served in! - and our wine bar was one of them!

Shocking to think of it now!

[flashylamp]

The smoking, I still think of it often. One of my very early jobs was waiting staff. Just off the kitchen there was a door to the store room and beside that another door where the storage freezers were - this doubled as the staff room. Every Moring chef would take some frozen tray ales etc out and leave them on top of the freezers to defrost (they went out in the evening ready for next day) and the whole day people would sit in the staff room smoking away, over the tray bakes and with the smoke leaving the open door and going right into the kitchen

[Ameanstreakamilewide]

@TicTac80

1996: my first part time job in M+S. I was a shop assistant (just working weekends whilst in Lower 6th/Yr 12).

I remember writing letters to enquire about job vacancies (or work experience) and enclosing my CV. I used "posh paper" and cool fonts! I got a pager first, then an old Ericsson mobile phone/brick. Wages were paid weekly in cash..in a brown envelope! I remember M+S would only accept debit cards (Switch or Delta), cheques (with a cheque guarantee card) or cash. No credits were allowed!
It was a job that opened my (rather sheltered) eyes to how the world could be. Two days before Xmas, they put me down to work in the food section (I worked up in the Kids' dept). The carnage was awful (I couldn't believe how people were behaving!)! For some stupid reason, the store didn't put the dividers on conveyor belts, so I ended up getting completely bawled out by some nasty woman for putting her massive Xmas food shop through with another bloke's shopping. They were standing together, chatting away, and getting quite close to each other. No obvious gap in shopping on conveyor belt. I thought they were a couple. Funny how you remember stuff, eh?

I remember there was a smoking section in the staff room. It was more accepted that men would be sexist/leery towards women. Oh god, that reminds me of something else...I remember during a job interview (for a different role - I was about 20) the manager asked me if I was thinking of getting married/having kids!!!

My first job was in M&S too, in the late 90s.

So many memories have just come flooding back!

My main job was on Foods and it was always carnage like that!
I remember on Saturdays, basically being on the till for the whole 8 hour shift.
And having to beg the supervisor (who wore a white paisley blouse, to my blue version) to let me go for a wee.

I'd be absolutely busting! My post pregnancy bladder couldn't handle that now.