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 🤷‍♀️

I worked in the City in the early 80s and sat opposite a man who smoked cigars all day long. One day I ducked under my desk to pick up something I had dropped and was so horrified to see the floor under his side of the desk covered in cockroaches that I jumped up and banged my head on the underside of the desk! It turned out they weren't cockroaches but dozens of his discarded cigar butts. When I asked to be moved to a different desk the manager laughed at me and pretty much called me a snowflake.

Going back a bit further to the 1960s I can remember my mum and our lovely family GP smoking during my doctor appointments (and presumably during my sisters frequent chest check ups) as well as every teachers desk in my primary school sporting a full ashtray.

At the time this was all pretty normal but my worst ever smoking experience (I've always been a nonsmoker) was a flight to Istanbul c.1988 when the plane was divided into non smoking in the right hand seats and smoking on the left ! I landed absolutely reeking and my first stop in `Istanbul was a launderette followed by a hairdressers for a wash and blow dry.

Daytime, on-the-job drinking, casual sexual harrassment, office "romance" (if you call giving BJ's outside the back of the restaurant "romance"), job interviews @ the pub, to name a few. Psychotic bosses who threw things and had tantrums. Ah, the good old days!

At the time this was all pretty normal but my worst ever smoking experience (I've always been a nonsmoker) was a flight to Istanbul c.1988 when the plane was divided into non smoking in the right hand seats and smoking on the left !

DH talks about when he and his buddies flew to Oz in 1997, they booked seats in the non-smoking section, and then went up and smoked in the smokers section.

So, so grim. Imagine being a non-smoker, stuck on a 12-hour flight, breathing in other people’s smoke for the entire time!

Still happens in Japan and Korea. (Not Stringfellows obviously).

Smoking at desks wasn't allowed in the noughties. Perhaps illegally but not in the majority of places. I certainly never came across that.
I remember loads of very boozy lunches and work socials. It was just part of it. And sadly shy people or people who didn't drink, weren't promoted. Being part of the gang was important.
I remember suits, pencil skirts and fitted shirts.
Lots of fag breaks.
Blokes printing off long reports - announcing they were off to the loo and read it sat on the toilet.
I was in a team of blokes and they took me under their wing but they also openly discussed ranking all the women in the company.
I was on a graduate scheme which had zero training. My boss was lecherous and generally awful. He was also really thick and thankfully got sacked in the end.
In fact that's another big change - lots more people got sacked back then.

Not outrageous now but just different:

Clocking in and out. I barely notice what time my team come and go.

Having your own desk with photos and trinkets and a drawer full of stationery. And even having a desktop computer. It's all hot desking and laptops now.

I worked at one place where on a Friday afternoon someone would pop to the pub across the road and bring back a tray of drinks! We were cystomer facing! Then at 5 take the empty glasses back and keep drinking of course.

All the workplace shagging! Although that doees still go on, so I'm told, I no longer have any active involvement!

Oh, and of course actually being in the office 5 days a week! Although that was normal up until around 3 years ago...

Myself and another colleague being referred to as ladies of the evening by the CTO.

He thought he was being so clever.

magazine industry 1990s - entire dept would pop out for lunch on a Friday at noon and might return at 4 if the boss was still with us.

Also regular industry piss ups where Willy waving publishers wanted to prove who was the most generous by using their company Amex card.

Bed hopping at conferences - there was ALWAYS gossip. And so many freebies.

I suspect most of us are only still alive as our livers are pickled.

Also, smoking rooms.

Ostentatiously homophobic "banter".

Nowhere I worked in the 00s still smoked.

Haha I was going to say similar. Client entertainment in a strip club. Taking female graduates and getting a lap dance in front of them.

The smell of cigs and beer in a pub

I moved out of London in 2004. I'm actually a little sad to hear going to the pub on a Friday and going back to do a bit of work for an hour half pissed doesn't go on anymore. We used to bind reports manually in the basement or summarise legal documents - we thought those jobs were easier after a few drinks.

Dh is French. He can do this with a large knife.

As for my experiences, smoking at work after hours in the mid nineties. Boozy nights away, entertainment evenings with free alcohol on tap.

In another company, lots of sexism. Women not listened. When I changed roles, I cut through the crap and went to the MD and basically told him if I were a customer, I’d not want to be doing business with them. Suddenly, all systems go at ironing out the massive errors. I was given a temp to sort out all the stuff I physically couldn’t do as I inherited a shit show of complaints, which hadn’t been dealt with for about 6 months. No appreciation shown, pay rise or progression etc of course. Totally ignored my business proposition for a role I wanted to do to benefit the business. Once I’d left, they gave the role I’d designed to a PA.

When I was at university, I temped and lasted 2 days in an office with just me and the manager of the company. I didn’t return as he was so lecherous I feared I’d end up being sexually assaulted.

During my student time, I also did a stint in a seedy pub, which attracted the working man. Lots and lots of sexual harassment. One charming middle aged alcoholic (he used to drink about 12 pints on a Friday night), was always full of banter told me if he put his dick inside me with chewing gum on the end, it would reach my mouth. As the most junior person there, having to clean out ashtrays with a paint brush into the bin. Slops from bitter and Guinness were also put back into the barrel.

I worked one summer as a student at an insurance company maybe 1990 and Friday lunch drinking was inevitable. But not anywhere else.

I wonder if they brought back pub lunches whether that would get more people back to the office now. God knows they were more fun that the bloody cereal bar and ping pong table installed in our office

From 2002 to 2019 I worked for a very well known Energy supplier. During my time there I had a few colleagues try it on at Christmas parties after a few too many etc, but two experiences stand out.

One was at a team event involving an overnight stay. My Director, two levels up from me came on to me, trying to kiss me and telling me how he struggled to be impartial when interacting with me as he found me so attractive. I rebuffed him but he then tried to talk to me again about it the following morning, trying to persuade me to sleep with him. Despite again telling him no clearly, he had another conversation in the office the following week and a week or so later on another team night out, where he cornered me and basically implied I wasn’t thinking straight to say no!

Thankfully I’d confided in a coworker the morning after the initial incident so she was on the lookout and pulled me away when she saw him getting me on my own. She also told my line manager about it a month or so later when the annual appraisal came around. She knew I wasn’t planning on saying anything as the Director had just left the business after being made redundant so I saw no point creating fuss when he was on his way out the door.

I chose not to take it further but I wish I had now. Not only was his behaviour disgusting (I was only about 26/27, he was 50 married with kids) and a total abuse of his position, I found out after he left that he downgraded my bonus percentage, probably because I refused to sleep with him. As I didn’t want anything being said there was nothing my manager could do to change what I was awarded but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

The worst one was at an industry convention in Edinburgh. An employee of a service provider took my business card when we were introduced for the first time (he worked in sales, so was manning the company’s stand in the exhibition hall and I was just doing the done thing by exchanging business cards) and chose to text me trying to get me to join him that evening at the after party he was going to and pushing for a date when back in London. When I explained I wasn’t interested, he kept texting me incessantly to the point where I had to escalate it to our account manager, who told the account director. He was livid and told him in no uncertain terms that it stopped immediately. I bumped into him a year later at a dinner and he was equally as smarmy and lecherous but i was able to keep him at a distance for most of the evening.

About 3 months after I heard he got sacked for putting his hand up a lady’s skirt at some drinks event and a year or two later he was in the paper as he’d been convicted of 3 rapes and one sexual assault! Makes me shudder to think how close I was to possibly becoming another victim.

Not an office but I worked in a pizza takeaway as a student. The delivery drivers alll smoked weed between deliveries. The boss used to spank me on the arse a lot. I thought it was funny.

@Warriormum1 it felt different to me as it was those in a senior position being disparaging to those in a less senior position and yes the secretaries were all female - a master and servant feel to me - I do not like the term Karen but women as well as men call other women Karen and it is a disrespectful term but not said to one who works for the other and imo does an immensely important role - often more important that the lawyers!

Me too. I'm thinking there must be massive variation between industries.

We still go for a pub lunch every now and then.

Soft drinks only, back in an hour, but we still go.

If we have time, which is rare!

Because we worked hard and played hard. There are so many policies and constantly offended about everything staff these days. Zero resilience, less sense of team. Want ‘work life balance’ at such a young age. Generalisation of course and yes of course there were some awful things that happened ‘back then’ that have rightfully changed but my goodness for me and most of my 20 something friends it was an absolute blast. It just isn’t the same now.

I remember the men in my office did a league table of the attractiveness of all the women in the office. All the blokes submitted their ratings on a spreadsheet which then ranked all the women on how good looking they were.

It was a bit of an open secret it was going on. I came in second place out of 20 so I was pretty chuffed at the time! These days If anyone tried organising such a thing they’d be marched off for a meeting with HR.

Just remembered another incident whilst at the same company, but different role. Would have been 23-24 years old and asked for a feedback session with the Director. He was giving me some very good feedback on my performance etc, but then said his advice would be I smile too much and there was a risk I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I honestly didn’t even know what to do with that at the time, but now a little older and wiser, I recognise the sexist stereotype that to get ahead a woman has to play the hard faced bitch or men won’t give her any respect.

Almost 20 years on, I have managed to do very well for myself; senior roles in a number of FTSE30 multinational companies and a six figure salary. Stick that smiley face where the sun don’t shine!!

Smoking and keeping booze in my office (university).

I think the tide had already turned by the noughties (which, by the way, was not ‘in the day’ as it was about five years ago I think).

One example is that in the nineties, groping etc was something that happened multiple time daily (I worked in an industry where is was considered an occupational hazard), it happened once in the very late nineties and the two fellas in charge of the place I worked came to my office to see if I was ok and put sanctions in place for the person who did it. I was so confused to think ‘maybe this isn’t OK actually’

Smoking was definitely on the way out and the ban was creeping in.

Strippers in pubs was mostly gone by the nineties and the tide was turning on lads mags and page 3.