What was normal in your workplace in the noughties that would be outrageous now

[Shhhhivegotasecret]

My example - all the men going off to continue business meeting at a Stringfellows leaving all the women behind…. Would be the stuff of tribunals nowadays, back then it was 🤷‍♀️

women not allowed to wear trousers, smoking at desks, lunchtime drinking and bottles of whisky in drawers for friday pm, secret santa gifts - edible g-string, chocolate body paint, etc., being chased around the office by colleague without his trousers. The more I think about it the longer the list gets...

She also got fanny wipes and lube!

😆

Bosses calling you up on maternity leave to tell you that you'd have to start again at the bottom of the ladder when you returned to work. That was fun.

Good grief.
Depends on your idea of fun clearly.

Reading this thread & the fun people had in the past I don’t understand why productivity hasn’t improved!

Photocopy bums at the Xmas party

Yeah mad isn't it. Almost as though productivity doesn't have anything to do with formulating endless policies to prevent worker bees cutting a little loose from time to time and more to do with actual investment in jobs, wages and infrastructure. Oh and not printing money.

I temped in a regional government office in 2004 where they’d smoke next to the windows when the boss wasn’t in. Also drank wine at desks on Friday afternoons. Shocking, really. I didnt stay long!

Yeh I know that but I am still surprised. IME (which is fairly wide lol - worked in a lot of places) many if not most offices has stopped people from smoking at their desks long before the ban came in.

Just bc it was banned in July 2007 doesn't mean people were frantically smoking at their Mac or in shops or on buses up until the end of June 2007. My recollection is that the ban in the end was mostly felt in pubs, where it had still been seen as acceptable to smoke.

After being invited to complete a workplace harassment training, a woman I worked with remarked, ‘I remember when harass was two words’. I’ll never forget that.

Started working life in 2003, civil service, we had a smoking room until the ban but not allowed to smoke at desks.

@Ocani the gov just can’t seem to figure that out though!

different people function testing the excerise vibrating pads devices or what ever it was called there was about 4-6 pads that you put on different muscles, to see who could handle the highest settings

Prep School in the late 00s:

Head known as Headmaster.

Headmaster organising whole school snowball fight across the whole school grounds, tackling children and pelting children with snowballs.

Children standing up when an adult came into the room.

Boarding Housemaster participating in free swimming sessions and lining children up to pick them up and throw them into the deep end - including 12 and 13 year old girls in swimsuits.

Having a bar in the Staff Dining Room (plus having a Staff Dining Room at all).

A culture of kissing your family goodbye at the start of term and catching up with them in the holidays.

A live in alcoholic caretaker.

Girls not permitted to wear trousers and younger boys forced to wear shorts year round.

Drinking alcohol on school residentials (teachers, not children!)

Fundraising dinners where Year 8 children acted as waiters, including serving alcohol.

Teachers who had decades of service in the school getting away with things nobody else would or should (one who smoked on his fire escape between lessons, one who refused to use technology and one who wrote reports purely consisting of things like 'Good work this term.'

Appointing register monitors because registers were big paper books that had to be collected from and returned to the office twice a day, not done digitally.

Walking classes to the village shop on hot days to buy them ice creams on a whim - no permission, no risk assessment, no dairy allergies.

Almost all staff willing to help or join in with anything - any evening, any time, no expectation of time in lieu or payment, no complaints about workload, work-life balance, hours etc. Just good will and genuine enjoyment of the job.

In most ways, I preferred those days!

@jesterdourt a really cynical part of me thinks they know full well and are happily watching businesses and services run aground to be venture capitalised for the lowest price while all the poor schmucks actually doing the work are underpaid and run ragged in precarious employment and simultaneously telling themselves how fortunate they are that at least they're working for an employer with 23 equality policies where they can bring their whole selves to work. That is, every part of themselves but the low waged short term housed bit. No one wants to see that.

No sanitary towel bins in the toilets because the boss refused to pay for them, stating that there was a perfectly good bin in the kitchen (which was near the loos). He had refused over the years to do anything.

Not long after I started there I stuck an (unused, I’m not a monster) pad flat on the kitchen bin lid. I had written in red marker pen “it is against the law not to provide a hygiene bin for me”.
A couple of weeks later we got the bins. Speaking to other people at the time, it seemed quite normal in small businesses in male environments not to bother with proper bins. Grim.

We had a tea trolley that came round several times a day with drinks, cakes and buscuits. The woman who manned it would take our lunch orders too and deliver them to your desk. She was saved from redundancy by our director and that was the only job he could create for her.

She was fabulous.

Sexual harassment.

One of the reasons I took a job at a national newspaper in 1997 was that you could still smoke at your desk (yes, I was and am an addict). I was massively peeved when they stopped it a couple of years later.

It was, however, the kind of job that entailed 3-hour boozy lunches, which sometimes continued until closing time. I ended up in rehab, but had a lot of fun getting there!

5 minute ‘interview’ in the stock room sat on a cardboard box.

Basically offered a really low wage in a shop. Which I took as it was my first job.

Wearing a nurse ‘hat’ which was made out of paper cardboard and you had to clip it on your hair. For working in a hospital.

It probably looked like something from a carry on film.

I also remember going out for the annual Christmas dinner with all the staff, all the service users with severe mental health problems/learning disabilities and we all got really drunk.

It probably wasn’t very professional, but it was a really good laugh!

It's interesting coz I can't see the culture ever reverting; and obviously lots of things have changed for the better; if less fun in some ways.

But it makes me wonder where it will finish up.

I don't know why but it makes me think of VAR in football. You bring in things to stop blatantly wrong things happening but you find you can apply it to everything.

But an hours lunch break with fair pay in 2000? It should be the same in 2023.

Men used to say, "I'd give her one" about women in the office. An older senior man who routinely touched all young women's bottoms and no one batted an eyelid, he was described as avuncular! Shagging in the post room. A girl in the office ate lots of tangerines and her boss asked her if she was "up the duff". Another guy used to roar "stop staring at SuperGinger's arse" everytime I walked past. Drugs consumed openly at desks on Fridays. Boozy lunches were expected 3-4 days a week. There was a "totty tally" everyday to see how much "totty" they could get into the paper - a national broadsheet.

Oh and some people looked at porn on their work desktops. Ughh!