Things you no longer see/do in the workplace

[TheGrumpiest]

I always really like those threads about food/shops that no longer exist, so I thought I'd start one about the work place. I joined the workforce in the early 90s working for quite large companies.

Luncheon Vouchers - loved these! Like Monopoly money.
Tea trolley lady that came round twice a day. Tea and coffee was free. Small packet of biscuits 5p.
Strippers 😲 A milestone birthday? Getting married? = stripper in the office at lunch time .
Rolls of fax paper on the floor every morning. You had to seperate and tear out each fax with a ruler.
Endless Memorandums with huge circulation lists typed out. You had to cross your name off and pass on to the next name once you had read it!
Friday lunch time = pub. People got quite tipsy.
Lack of HR type processes/concept of people management/development etc. People were just asked to not come back the next day if deemed unsuitable... One lady saw her own (unique) job advertised in the local paper and realised her time was up 😲

BTW these aren't necessarily things I miss about the workplace. Just things that don't exist anymore or not acceptable! Tell us yours!

Ties! I can’t remember the last time I saw some one at work wearing one. Or anywhere apart from on TV, a wedding or funeral. We had a very strict dress code - suits for everyone. It gradually got relaxed and eventually around 2006 the men in the office had a bit of a strop about ties and they were allowed to stop wearing them. Dress down Fridays came in then and eventually Dress for your day.

The banter and high jinks in the 90s. I remember coming back from an overseas holiday with a lovely tan and I got in the office lift with the department head. He looked me up and down and said with a laugh "does that tan go all over?" I kept a straight face and said "no, I've got a little white bit under my wedding ring". There was no offence meant or taken, and we both just laughed and went about our days.

I remember another time, one of the managers was feeling mischievous. He was chatting to one of the secretaries by the lift. While they were standing talking the secretary had momentarily taken off her high heels because they were hurting. When the lift came (fortunately it was empty), he reached down, grabbed one of her shoes and threw it in the lift just before the doors closed! She had to traipse round the building trying to find her shoe.

Your line manager would know about your personal home life, not for any particular reason. Having good friends at work, even people you weren’t “friends” with if that makes sense.

My workplace is still very much like this, we all have breaks and lunch together and know all the ins and outs of each others day to day lives. We missed it terribly in lockdowns, we were still in the workplace but eating at desks or only two allowed at a time in the kitchen, having teams meetings with people in the same building instead of face to face, we are really appreciating being back to normal again now.

The big one is smoking. I can remember going into one woman's office that had two overflowing ashtrays on her desk and a strong smell of smoke. It was horrible.
More formal dress codes. Technology has of course changed. I can remember writing out letters and giving them to the secretary to type up.
When I started work the better employers were all cracking down on racism and sexism. There was a lot of grumbling from mainly older men that they couldn't even have a joke anymore.
Lack of HR processes like appraisals or even supervision.
I remember when the job title inflation happened. This is why when people say their parents were well paid even though only being a - modest job title - I am always sceptical. People used to have modest job titles. Only more senior people were called managers. If you had some responsibility for managing a few people or a small team you would be called a supervisor or a senior (job title of staff you managed). I am called a manager and don't manage a single member of staff.
But someone realised job title inflation was an easy perk to give staff that cost nothing. So suddenly people had job titles that made them seem far more senior than the reality. Even minimum wage job titles changed. People were no longer street sweepers or cashiers.
Training used to be better though with employers putting in more money than they do know.
Equal opportunities training was everywhere in the early nineties. Unless you worked in a pretty backward place, you would have attended equal opportunities training, and probably a few courses. It also used to be emphasised far more at interview. I knew I had to be shit hot in answering that question. Now it often feels like an add-on or is barely mentioned.
Safeguarding procedures existed but were not as developed as now and there was still having to be a push to get people to see safeguarding is everyone's business.
GDRP did not exist. I remember working for a non-profit and one of my colleagues was given by a school a printout of every child's name and address in the school so we could contact them directly. No idea what the parents thought of it.
Designing posters by letraset for a short time, and then using very basic Microsoft art. You used to be able to buy from Staples pre-printed posters with designs around the borders that you could just print text onto. I thought they were amazing at the time.

@when I think that sounds a dreadful place to work.

Paper knickers and clean tights to put on before a night out if you werent going home to change first

Why paper? Couldn't a clean pair of normal ones be brought in with the clean tights?

They were a bit of a gimmick in the 70s, advertised for freshness, you bought a pack of them, individually wrapped. Of course normal knicks were ok too.

paper payslips, or even any sort of notification you've been paid other than having to log into a system you can't remember the password for or check your bank account.

I still get paper payslips too

I stopped getting paper payslips about 5 years ago.

Fax machines are still used where I work. GP surgeries send us client medical reports. Try explaining to a 20 something how it works is fun.
Minicom phones for the deaf. Now replaced by email etc.
A couple relate to my time in banking, as follows
Punched cards for reordering paying in books.
Customer signatures on actual cards.
Cheques. Every morning the cheques arrived from the clearing house and we would have to reconcile and then alphabetically sort them before putting them in storage. 3000 cheques was a quiet day.
Ashtrays with the company logo embossed on them.

I feel like we have definitely worked together!!

thisbwas very much my working life in the late nineties/early noughties. In fact in 2006 I was a PA & used to have to go and get my boss’s weekend photos developed. Always snaps of his mistress, naked. Then I’d have to ring his wife and go thru their joint weekly diary!!

We even had male strippers in the office!! It was a big global magazine aimed at men.

When someone’s wife/partner/kids would call in on the office phone

I used to be secretary to a guy, and his OW would call him on his phone occasionally. It was an open-plan office and if he wasn't at his desk, I'd have to call him over - "Bob! phone for you!" Often as not he'd holler back "Who is it?" and I'd stand there tongue-tied, not feeling able to shout her name halfway across the office. I was quite young and didn't want him to know that I knew that he had an OW ... oof, so awkward

Real typewriters.
A messenger. Ours moved all day between 3 local branches, moving paperwork etc around.
Telex.
A huge, manually kept index of each individual account. This was where we went to get account numbers, addresses, make updates etc. No simple searching on a computer.
Smoking.

Dictation - into a machine or sometimes directly to a secretary who sat there with her pen and notebook! "The Girls" yes, we called them that then used to find it very amusing that I had to dictate rude words ( we were solicitors who did some criminal defence work) in my RP voice. They had to sew up the legal documents with green tape and put seals on them too.

I REALLY miss the tea trolley and the sandwich man. I mean, I still have access to both tea and sandwiches but it was just a nice distraction!

I just had a meeting yesterday about getting rid of faxes in one particular department of the bank I work in. In 2022. The mind boggles!

Management had separate loos in the first Bank I worked at in early 80's

@bare several places I work in still
have separate management kitchenettes, shower rooms and toilets. With much better fixtures and fittings. So everyone else try’s to use them! The class system in the workplace is still alive🤣

Executive desk toys - like those clacky balls

Facilities would have a fit these days with all the hot desking

Clacky balls - love it! The proper name is Newton's cradle, but I prefer clacky balls.

Desktop keyboards are better than laptops in accounts departments, because you have a dedicated numeric keypad on the side and when most of what you are doing is numeric, it is far better (and a whole lot quicker) than having to use the numbers above the letters.

We still had a 10am sandwich trolley when I was last in the office in March 2030. Whether it will survive when we return to hybrid working remains to be seen.

Have you time travelled @BestIsWest ?

can I have next weeks lotto numbers🤣

Haha! @Alphabet1spaghetti2 I’ll share them with you! With luck I’ll be retired by 2030!

We used to have a messenger, he travelled from a town in East Sussex to the head office in London every day......by train, carrying loads of envelopes both ways. I suppose he was the equivalent of email! This was obviously before even fax machines. 70s/80s

A pp mentioned wet photo copies, yep remember them, it was like developing a photo, couldn't let one sheet see the light then peeling two soaking wet, very full of chemicals sheets, apart and waving about to dry. Am sure the chemicals were not good for us.

I do miss my golf ball typewriter though, I thought it was the bees knees when it replaced my 50 year old manual one.

Also as others, smoking in the office, Friday lunchtime drinks, oh and carrying on the drinking Friday afternoon, passing bottles of Pils Lager over the cubicles in the loo, guess the only reason the bosses never said anything was because they used to have a Friday afternoon lock in at one pub in town, pubs used to shut in the afternoon then.