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 don't think I have ever used a fax machine. One sat in the corner of the office at my first job occasionally spitting out faxes, but I never actually sent one.

Separately watching home alone made in 1990 my kids were astonished about landlines and no mobile phones! More astonished than when Kevin was left at home by his parents. 😂

I remember smoking rooms but never smoking in the offices in the 00s, I've been working since 1994. I do remember smoking in the staff room in a care home, it was awful as a non-smoker. Even in the 90s I don't remember smoking in hairdressers.

As for sexual harassment, in the 00s it wasn't being ignored if anything it was being dealt with better. I remember someone made a comment about my boobs when she thought I couldn't hear. I could and I took it to management and she was sacked on the spot.

Glad to see a lot of older posters seem - like me - to remember stuff disappearing in the 90s . Makes me feel my memory isn't going - at least not yet

An actual fax machine I remember using in about 2012 Nowadays you make a PDF version of something and email it or scan it on a photocopier and email from there

Being able to live in central London and live a fucking amazing life * on a £3.50 an hour temp job.

• Life consisted of sharing a one bed flat in Regent's Park with two others, walking everywhere, eating next to nothing, going to the pub in soho every night and Heaven at the weekend. Best days of my life.

I can also remember making teas and coffees for a directors meeting (which wasn't my job, but one of the 'girls' was always asked to, of course) around 2003. I was 21ish.

Put the tray on the table and one of the sleazy sales Directors said 'there's a good girl' and patted my bottom. I slapped his face, hard. Total instinct, I just turned around and whacked him.

Now of course, he would be sacked for his behaviour and so would I.

Instead, the other directors roared laughing, told him it served him right and from then on I was known as the feisty one that they probably shouldn't touch, at the risk of getting walloped.

Absolutely insane.

I feel like I’ve entered some kind of split in the space-time continuum on this thread as I started working full-time in 2003 (with holiday and Saturday jobs before then) and most of this stuff would have been completely unimaginably in the places I worked at. In fact, the only smoking indoors I recall was when I was still at uni and an elderly, extremely distinguished professor was permitted as an exception to smoke while giving tutorials. That would have been around 2000 and was much commented on and rather exotic at the time.

What I do think has really changed is that casual homophobia was very common when I started work and gay colleagues not very visible. Even then, though, this tended to be far less the case for younger people. All that has completely flipped now, thankfully. Can’t remember the last time I heard homophobic banter at work and I can’t think of any colleague, in the UK at least, who is vague about their home life.

The smoking! Looking across an open plan office and seeing a haze of ciggy smoke. On site canteen which served bacon sandwiches for breakfast and a cooked lunch. Marvelling at the first fax machine in the office (1987). Computer printouts on wide green striped perforated paper, with sprocket holes. These massive tomes were bound in plastic covers - it was a real pain having to line up the sprocket holes to thread them through the plastic prong. These things took up loads of storage space!

Oh, I've just remembered - creating manual spreadsheets on accounting paper - A3 sheets with heading rows & columns. We had to fill them in with pencil, and a mistake in the top row meant rubbing all the other figures out and starting again! I remember the amazement and wonder when Supercalc was introduced - a complete game changer!

My first summer job was in a wages office for a construction company - 3 out of my 5 colleagues smoked constantly. Often had to go down to the yard to deliver payslips while trying not to look at the naked women plastering the walls. Oh, and once when the office was having an air vent installed, one of my colleagues said "You can't leave it like that, a darkie could get in there", and nobody so much as blinked.
Btw, this was the 90s, not the 70s!!

I started work in 1999 and there were defo people who smoked in the stairwells, although no at desk smoking, and defo yes to the liquid lunches on Fridays. We'd get fairly merry and then come back for the last few hours!

But I also remember as a kid in the early 90s going to the secondary school staff room and there were two; one of which was like a fog with smoke!

@Giraffescarf You’re right, life was more fun then & especially more in the 70s & 80s.
I worked in a large organisation & we actually enjoyed ourselves & worked conscientiously too.

A few thoughts on points raised above.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet of choice in the 80s but it was single tab so if you wanted several tables they had to be arranged diagonally so column widths didn't mess up.

On homophobia - nastiness was not acceptable in the 80s although gay colleagues had to be more discreet than they would do know. Comments were different to now but the guys I worked with gave as good as they got. AIDS hung like the grim reaper over the blokes though and two guys I worked with back then died of it. One was a twat and the other was one of the kindest and most generous persons I've ever met. Still miss him over 20 years on.

Not sure what it's like now but lesbians were invisible and there must have been some

Ah, yes it was Lotus 123! Black background with white text I seem to remember.

My first proper job would have been mid 1980s.

The cleaner would come in and then make us all hot drink and bring it to the office.

I used a telex and then they updated and got a fax machine and 'computers'. They didn't send me on the training as I was fairly junior, but I'd done A Level computer science so when we had new training they had worked out I know my way around the keyboard.

We even had an early form of email.

Our work bar only just closed in 2022!

Same with me

First encountered email in around 1992 but it was internal - you couldn't send messages outside let alone attachments.

Protocols around email use and a bit later internet use took a while to establish. In the early days of internet remember people running spread betting accounts and watching porn on the office internet. Used to get pictures of 25 stone naked women, a bloke who'd removed all the skin off his face with a razor blade while high on angel dust

Firewalls are stronger now and behaviour more well established

We had none of this 'men going off' stuff. But people did smoke in the office. But I think by then we had already stopped the long boozy lunches (publishing) in the 90s.

You could
Smoke in the office kitchen at my first job which I started in 1999 and left November 2000

Not outrageous but deffo not allowed now. I work for NHS. No way would we now be allowed 3 hour lunches with drinks in a pub!!

Also the Gender Identity secretaries all smoked in their office you opened the door to a blue haze before your eyes adjusted!

How I miss those boozy lunches but a bit hard on a Friday afternoon coming back and typing up post mortems!!

It definitely did happen until near the end of the smoking ban as I was only working for this law firm from 2003-2007. I think it was mainly rather 'old school' people that did it, but it definitely happened.

I worked in law and fax machines were a thing well into the noughties, because email wasn't an accepted form of transferring documents that you had to prove receipt of, because emails can go missing. Perhaps that why people still remember them? Lots of my workplaces had a fax machine for years after they were really used much, and I mainly remember them receiving spam!

I worked in an office in Edinburgh after I left university where women couldn't wear trousers. That would have been 1996. I can place it because of when I graduated.

I started work in the 1980's, I'd say 95% of the stuff on this thread took place in the 1990's and before, not the noughties which were 2000 onwards. My offices had stopped smoking, companies provided plants etc, maybe still down the pub on a Friday but only for lunch and a swift half by 2000. Things have changed so massively.

I still go out for the occasional pint at lunch in The City, just for a bit of "normal" life for an hour or so, away from corporate life with all its jargon and banal bollocks.

The problem is, nowadays it is only occasional. Used to be every lunch but I still seemed to have more money on me then. I baulked when a pint went over £2, now it's 3 times that. And so many of my go-to boozers around Moorgate have gone; The Crispin, The Rack and Tenter, The Plough on Barbican high walk. Either boarded up or replaced with some overpriced restaurant that calls itself a "kitchen" or a "grill" and is basically off limits unless you have a company Amex to cane.

I'm bored. I want 1997 back.

A big stack of porn magazines in the men's toilets.

Thankfully a rather feisty female freelancer discovered them when she used the men's by mistake and complained that it was totally offensive to women.

She was a good friend of an important client so the operations manager had no choice but to remove them.

He was too embarrassed to admit that a woman had forced him to do it though, so he made out it was his idea to "bring the office more in line with modern times".