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

Rocking.

Sharing a tiny office with a chain smoker
Pub at lunchtime
Gestetner duplicator (no copiers back then)
Manual typewriters
Hand cranked adding machines
Female staff had to wear skirt or dress
Male staff had to wear suit & tie
Office junior came round with tea/coffee mid am and mid pm
Manual franking machines
Carbon paper
Underlining in red ink

@Sparklingbrook

That all sounds very familiar *@Inanun2*. Sitting there encoding cheques and trying to make it all balance so we could go home!

Remember the huge pile of statements on the 1st of the month to put into the window envelopes?

Oh yes I remember all that too. Thursday morning wages BGCs.....could take all day to balance.

We weren't allowed overdrafts and used to have to get the sub manager to countersign anything we paid in, after we explained where the money came from. When a big Tescos opened in town we realised they only banked on Tuesdays and Fridays (with a different bank) , so could cash a cheque twice a week, pay it in, and do the same a few days later to cover it. Max £50 with a cheque card but it made all the difference. I used to write 'building society' on the credit slip, and our sub manager would smirk and say "I think you mean the bank of Tescos....."!

The "lads" used to go to the pub at lunchtime. There were things that would horrify younger people - page 3/dirty magazines/banter among the same lads. They'd be told to stop it now but it was accepted as part of factory culture then. 1990s.

@harknesswitch

The brown internal envelopes, the type with holes in them and boxes to write the name and dept it went to

Came on here to say this! I was always oddly fascinated by keeping a really old one going.

Also -- a special dining room for Board members, separate from the staff canteen.

We all had our very own office. At worst we shared two to an office. And we had personal pictures and stationery and so forth.

To get anything photocopied you had to fill in a form and take it down to the photocopying room where the photocopiers ran it through a machine. Photocopiers could only copy stuff same size of smaller, not bigger.

For major presentations to new business a chap came in and drew up the charts on huge pieces of poly board, by hand using felt pens. We got all technical and got an overhead projector and got loads of static electric shocks.

And we had huge expense accounts and got pissed at lunchtime.

I worked in a bank in the early 1990s and everyone only ever called the manager Mr -. Nobody ever called him, and it always was a him, by his first name.
I remember not being allowed to go overdrawn and I didn't get a promotion because I was pregnant.

Oh oh oh and we had a little room called ‘the ladies room’ with a bed and hot water bottles where ladies who were Indisposed (ie That Time Of The Month) could go for a little lie down. (Which was mostly used for illicit shagging and hangovers).

Mortgage applications all handwritten in paper, either posted or faxed. All fees taken as cheques (although they upgraded during my time there).

This was 2002, so not that long ago!

Didn't Access (Your flexible friend) become Mastercard?
@MarxandMarzipan I have a relative who still writes with a ruler or at least I think they do. It may have become a natural letter formation through habit. They're 80!

Ah, smoking at my desk, life just isn't the same any more.

The young guy in my last office found it hilarious that we still sent faxes up until 2013. To be fair, I was 23 in 2013 and found it hilarious too

I started as a trainee engineer with a drawing board and actual Rotring pens. I was damn good at drawing. Mistakes had to be scraped off the film with the tip of a razor blade. Lettering hand stencilled or (swoon) Letraset. There was only one computer in the office and you hand wrote letters for typing. Calculations all worked out by hand on squared paper. The rush to get 100 blue print drawings folded and in the post on a Friday.
On site there was no top to toe safety gear, just boots, hard hat and a hi Vis vest, I remember a whole summer setting out on a dam in cutoff jeans.
I would so like to take our grads back to 1990 for a few weeks.

I had a job as a receptionist/telephonist and used a PABX switchboard.
Telex machines
Franking machines
Smoking at your desk
Tea lady came round with a trolley...coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon.
Blokes used to go to the Pub at lunchtime to see the strippers

These days it seems that even for the most low paid, shit jobs you have to go through screening as if you are were applying to become an astrophysicist or brain surgeon. Why?

Yeah, long online questionnaires and scenarios to assess, for a zero hour minimum wage job. And at the end it tells you that you have failed to get through.

I didn't think I'd started work long enough ago for anything to be strange but actually I have remembered some from reading the other responses!

Defo remember being told to do a CV on nice paper, with colours (subtle) and fonts. Can't quite get my head around making it boring and easy to read /print /photocopy now which probably doesn't help

I worked in a shop selling cigarettes and you could buy tobacco products from age 16 but you had to be 18 to buy a lighter because of the solvent. Had several arguments about this. I think 16 year olds were allowed to buy matches, though. We were just allowed to eyeball people's age and only ask for ID if they looked underage, rather than under 30. That tended to be a bit dodgy if you were young yourself and didn't know how to judge people's ages very well, and anyone over 20 would often get shirty about it, so challenge 30 probably isn't a bad policy as at least it's now expected.

Vaguely remember cheque guarantee cards and not being able to process a return/refund for anything paid for by cheque until 3 working days later in order to give it chance to clear. When we moved to chip and pin we stopped taking cheques at all, which greatly annoyed some people.

We had a special machine with a database of every single book in it which we could use to order books in (whsmith) as long as the customer knew the ISBN, title or author, but it was a separate terminal to the normal tills, right at the back of the shop so if you were the only one on the till you had to phone downstairs to get someone to come up and do the order.

Not long after I started, our till system was upgraded and I remember being fascinated that it became a mini computer running on Windows with a tiny but full keyboard. Totally normal now and any non computer epos system would be seen as antiquated.

Paper gift vouchers that never expired, and you'd give change out in vouchers up to the whole £1 and up to 99p in cash. No useless gift card with 32 pence remaining.

I worked for a graphics studio for my first full time job. We provided content for screens in waiting rooms, which was very high tech at the time! I would make up the graphics and string them all together, and then they would run through a dedicated computer which would overlay it with hold style muzak and run it through a TV which was attached to a video and DVD recorder. About half the surgeries (doctors and vets) ran their waiting room info screens on video, rather than DVD. There were also no adverts! They had the practice info with staff, opening times, phone number etc and the rest of the time was filled up with information taken from NHS leaflets or health campaigns. The vet ones might have info about their yearly subscription service for vaccinations etc but that was as close as you got to an ad.

Because it was run through a TV to be recorded even for the DVD versions, it was totally fine for the graphics to be a bit "spiky" or not smoothed out and you had to be careful with certain colours and delicate details which would be lost in this rendering process.

My first Saturday job at 16 was at the Co-op. We had little sticky price labels that we put on the products with a gun and then rang into the till.
Customers were allowed to make sexist remarks, I remember having to just laugh things off.
Everything was done by cash or cheque. You'd get a credit card once in a blue moon and you had to fill in the slip manually and use the annoying machine to make a copy of the card number.
We sold milk tokens and gave them.out free to people with vouchers from the DSS.
Wages were in cash in a little brown envelope.

I got.my Saturday job by walking into a Co op and asking if they needed anyone! They hired me on the spot.

Worked in inner city factory during Uni holidays mid 90s. Was told to have - toilet break - fag break - lunch. I stupidly said I didn't smoke. Got a blank stare so went to smoking area anyway. Made to sit in smoke filled canteen for 30 min lunch, made me feel ill so took my packed lunch outside and read my book in the sunshine. Got told off for making the place look scruffy.

Cycle couriers delivering important letters,then taking the replies back.
Also a legion of men in the City of London who would walk from Bank branches taking paperwork.
I hated the indoor smoking.
Getting paid cash in a small brown envelope.

Having a morning and afternoon tea break plus an hour lunch.
Getting paid double time for Sunday’s and bank holidays.
Being able to opt out of Sunday working.
Half day closing on a Thursday.

I started work in 2001 and although smoking in the office wasn't permitted, we did have a smoking room.

Drinking in the pub at lunchtime and even in the office during Christmas week. On Christmas eve I remember walking in at 8.30am and being handed a baileys coffee.

Blatant sexual harassment. There was so much we put up with because it was considered "the norm".

Oh, being paid extra to work after hours, on a Sunday or Bank Holiday!!

Why don't they do that any more?

This reminds me of working in a school around 2006. We still used a massive tv which was kept on a huge wooden trolley. I had to wheel it from the far side of the school through to the classroom and needed help her to get it through the doors and over slight bumps. The remote control was always missing from the trolley and so too was the extention lead. There would be an enquiry as to who had taken the remote and extention lead whilst the kids got excited about the prospect of watching the tv. I think I we still used videos even as recently as 2006. Then after watching the programmw, I would have to wheel the damn thing all the way back again.
We also had a portable oven and stove. If you had the oven on, only one hob would work. It took ages and ages to cook anything.

First job we got paid weekly in cash! Little brown envelope with holes in for some reason, with a paper run down of pay and deductions inside. We used to go up to the accounts office, sign for the envelope and then open it to check they hadn’t done you out of a couple of quid! Then they got all high tech and introduced cheques so you had to dash to the bank in your lunch hour to cash the cheque so you had money to spend. Then they got really smart and paid it straight into your account.