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!

Omg some of these take me back!

microfiche machines although I’ve never used one
It used to be fine to smoke in most offices. And cinemas, restaurants, planes, trains!
whiteboards
overhead projectors and acetates
getting drunk on Friday lunchtime was completely acceptable
everyone had a bin
lever arch files everywhere
ditto massive grey filing cabinets

“cc” on emails stands for “carbon copy” btw, going back to the days when a memo would be typed with carbon paper underneath so a second recipient literally got a “carbon copy” of the original document

Banking mountains of cash on a Monday morning. In a previous life, I worked in hospitality management. One of the outlets I ran was a very large & busy city centre bar & restaurant.

In those days (late 80s) the bar was cash only and most restaurant customers also paid in cash. We used to take tens of thousands of pounds in cash over a busy weekend, sometimes more than we could cram into the safe, and it all had to be sorted, counted, reconciled & banked. When piles of cash doesn’t belong to you, it’s just a lot of annoying bits of paper. The whole process took hours on a Monday morning. I assume that these days when everyone pays electronically it’s all done in 5 minutes on the computer.

Pager machines, I had a job one summer working at a hospice and people would ring me tell me the message to send via the pager then I’d have to use the pager machine to page another member of staff, totally pointless .

The mainframe computer room with all it's heat and humming noises.

These still exist, but they're more likely to be far away from the office, with much more restricted access. With lots of air con, and aisles arranged to improve airflow (all servers venting in the same direction.) You get a lot more computing power in much less physical space these days, though, and less likely to be a mainframe.

We still have a canteen, free tea and coffee, shared photocopier/printer (not that it's used so much these days.) We have desk phones (though I can't remember the code to log into mine.) Pigeon holes. And there are probably internal envelopes around, but I haven't used one since they allowed you to scan expense receipts rather than send in the actual paper (only 3 or 4 years ago.)

I miss Friday pub lunches, but my manager has been muttering about having one to get everyone in to the office on the same day, for some team socialising.

Smoking rooms!! I haven't worked in an office for about 15 years, I suspect its alot less fun than it used to be.

at my place of work page 3 girls from years ago still stuck up around the place. Still got internal mail with the orange envelopes and telephones on desks in the offices, wouldn’t have known this wasn’t common until this thread 😂

Ooh did anyone else have an answer machine in the office that had to be checked every morning and all the messages copied out?

Smoking room
Tea trolley
Friday lunch time visit to pub with colleagues
Pigeon holes
Copies of documents in triplicate
The machine that manually copied cheques

Why paper knickers, why did you have to change?!? And if you did why didn't you just bring in a spare pair of knickers?!

Just before I started but colleagues met in a covert location with staff from the town’s rival bank branches to swap notes so each bank had its own notes to distribute to customers

no second thought to wee Jeanie strolling through paisley with £50k in her handbag

I left a job partly for this reason a few years ago. I was 29 and had been working since I was 18, thought I was progressing my career by moving but the role ended up having almost nothing to do but one thing I did have to do was traipse up and down three flights of stairs to make drinks for the rest of the team. Doesn’t sound a big thing written down but made me feel really small.

Comic Relief and Children in Need being a huge thing in the office with everyone dressing up and doing mad things to raise money.

The smoking room was responsible for at least three marriages breaking up in our office.

Apparently making tea so badly once meant no one wanted me to brew up again.

Stationery cupboard.
Fax machine at second office that used to spew paper under the desk at the back. I discovered a few dozen abandoned. Slightly moving the machine stopped it from happening again.

Clerks who could only type two fingered.

Clock in card machine that was a bit aggressive.

Going down to the big safe in the basement with my trolley and collecting boxes of blank cheques. I then had to transport them to IT for printing.
No online payments in those days, all of our creditors got sent a cheque.

Yes, I have a 3 pack of Tippex i do a lot of manual recording for my job

I started teaching in 1999 and most of us smoked. The smoking room was packed at break.

I miss my own desk. I HATE hot-desking. I loved having my own desk with my photos and cards, headphones, my own pens, ruler, hole punch; scissors etc. I've got a definite thing for stationery 😊

Written flexi sheets, we all kept our own & they were never checked.

I joined the workforce in the early 00s.
We had a fax machine (mostly used for sending daft stuff to the office the opposite side of the narrow road so we could see their reaction when they received it )
Pigeon holes for outgoing memos that went into hand written envelopes at the end of the day and had stamps licked and stuck on.
Everything was on paper. It was an insurance broker, we'd get policies by post, photocopy them, file them, and send the originals to the customer. Letters typed on a PC but not saved, just printed in duplicate and one copy filed.
Wages were a late cheque in a brown envelope.
Lunch was 1hr.
Smoking at the desk.
A boss that stared at my chest so I made sure to take a random file with me to tuck against me and cross my arms over if I had to talk to him.

Years later (2010-19) I worked somewhere where my boss had floppy drive backups (IT had to specially fit a floppy drive if they updated her PC) and didn't trust the servers, so everything had to be printed. In triplicate.
Also only women were ever asked to man (?!) reception. (I was young and bolshy then and asked the HR bod doing the rota and wanting to take me away from a very busy dept at a very bad time if there was something specifically operated by vagina or if she would be asking the men too. How I didn't get in massive trouble I've no idea. But a token man was put on the rota from then on)

Just today at work I've spent hours doing paper filing and archiving. Still necessary in some industries where manual signing of contracts happens.

On the opposite end of the scale - The record shop in town got a coffee machine in about 2005 and did coffee in paper cups to take away. Utter decadence. Going over the road and buying a coffee of all things! When there was a kettle 2 floors up and bulk instant provided free! So luxurious!

Oh, and I typed from dictation using a machine to play the mini cassettes that was operated by foot pedal. Had a boss (the pervy one) who liked to dictate while listening to the football on the radio, so all the tapes were stretched from constant rewinding to hear what he said just as Arsenal scored.

smoking .Giving to hoots what people think of you.

Like these?

Jumping in the wheelie bins to flatten the boxes down.

Sitting on a pallet and being lifted up by a forklift to count the overstock.

Work in the NHS. We still have the internal mail envelopes and the fax machines! One clinic I worked in recently still had the tiny cassettes for dictation.

Worked in a pharmacy as a student. I used to get paid in cash in a little prescription bag.

My sister works for a bank apparently many moons ago they all had to call each other “Mr” and “Mrs”, there was a drinks cabinet, you had to ask your bosses permission to get married and they had an annual beauty contest!