For those of you who worked in an office in 1960's - 1980's

[Choccyhobnob]

The childhood memories thread reminded me of something I have wondered for years!

I work in an office and have done for the last 12 years. I have never known a time before emails and photocopiers.

My question is this - what did you actually do? I just can't imagine how office life worked back then and I'm really interested!

Thank you for indulging my perhaps naïve questions!

Ecclestiastes, you have to explain what "pricing up tins of beans with a gun" means, it's like a stapler but with price tags coming out, not an actual "gun" ...

Lol, Alpha, the pricing gun was the most fun ever. And working on a proper till with keys, like in Open all Hours.

Happydays wrote: "I took letters down in shorthand."

I also know how to write in shorthand! A skill seldom used nowadays. Haven't taken any letters though (apart from my own).

They still use pricing guns in the local grocery stores though.

My first job involved programming for a logistics firm on an old IBM mainframe called S/38 I believe, and the language was called "RPG IV" (it had nothing to do with role playing games, but stood for report program generator). It was absolutely horrific. You didn't write in sentences like in more modern programming languages, but it was position based so it depended on in which "column" (position) you placed some signs what kind of meaning they carried. During the lunch break me and my colleagues were openly scouring the papers for other employment in order to leave that job as soon as possible. I was newly employed at that firm, and was sort of forbidden to speak to the client about my work when the client was around (I think the firm had charged for three experts but we were just two experts and one rookie=me). This was just before the slump in the early 1990's so the job market was still quite good and I managed to wriggle out of there but in hindsight my next job was sort of a "out of the frying pan into the fire" experience, but that's a topic for another day.

^PRG III, sorry...

Ah - pricing guns. Fond memories of price gun fights or silently sticking labels to someone else's back and seeing how many you could attach before they noticed.

This thread is making me nostalgic for tea breaks! We never use to have our tea at our desks, there was a special section of the office for that with sofas where you could have a good old chat. (Off topic but I also fondly remember the tea breaks at Marks and Spencers where everything was from the food hall but really cheap!)

A colleague in the civil service told me that rather than clearing her desk at the end of the day (as was the rule), she'd parcel all her files into an internal envelope and address it to herself, and they'd arrive back to get the next morning!

Just remembered when I started at the immigration service I had a lesson on the proper way to attach files. White tape for a single individual and blue tape for multiples in a family group. Doing this wrong got you a telling off from the head of filing!

We had a trolley service at 11am sharp with tea, cakes and sandwiches (not free).

Late 70s? - the thrill of the Golfball typewriter - so powerful!

Wine bar for lunch using Luncheon Vouchers

Telephone cleaning company who used to visit around once a month to disinfect the phone handsets

Smoking at your desk

Tippex & carbon sheets

Tea trolley

Ah, the memories

Oh, I would love a pricing gun. Would be great present for young kids who still love to play "shop".

I remember whenever our computers went down (often) we used to be told to get on with non-pc tasks. Totally impossible these days so love it when there's a network crash

My dad worked for Hewlett Packard in 80s and 90s and early/mid 90s he used to work on a laptop at home which was about 4/5 inches thick and weighed a tonne. It had a green screen.ill attach an image.

He also had a pager for years. I remember him getting a Vodafone car phone. It wasnt a mobile and the receiver/main unit was stored in the boot. It was attached to the dashboard at side of car radio and you could lift up the receiver on a twirly cord.

Notsure if above was same one but looked similar!!

How technology has moved on.

As late as 1988 when I worked in admin at Imperial College which even then was world-renowned in science & technology, there was one fax machine on that whole campus in South Kensington. From one of the engineering schools I used to trudge over to the Sherfield Building to send a fax!

Our office had a couple of those "laptops" that we could take home to use. To me it seemed like carrying a small refrigerator. We would save documents on diskettes and bring them in to the office to print.

I set up my own business, with a partner, in 1998. We used to say to each other "have you checked the email this week?"

When i worked for post office telephones it changed into BT. Id been promoted by then and sold the first ever 'mobile' phones which were the size of a bricks and had to have a receiver inthe car boot the size of a suitcase. We also sold the first ever phonecards I still have some of the otiginal promotional ones we gave out.. i thought they msy be worth someting but a look pn ebay says no!
Another memory was the advent of thr Trimphone. People were so excited by them and they sold like hot cakes..
I now have modern trimphone in my 1970s house !

BIWI I still remember a colleague of mine who would roll his desk chair to his doorway and shout down the corridor "Hey Seneca, I sent you an email."

Seneca / BIWI
DH still gets people phoning to ask if he got their emails

They still use pricing guns in the local grocery stores though.

Ah, but I bet these days you have to do an online training module in its correct use and resit if you get less than 80%, and then set a target following discussion with your line manager to price up 10% more beans next quarter than last quarter to be eligible for the performance related element of your salary award.

What were those big blue zipped bags that you sent post in called? I remember I had a box of little orange tags to seal them. Are they still around ?

Our firm bought this around 1993. Awesome. We could take it out to do work at clients. Before then, we used to have to being the paperwork back to the office to do the computing/printing and then go back to the clients with the reports.

Ooh I remember the Pinks file and the weekly telephone cleaning people.
In the late 80s I worked at a metal finishing company (oh the glamour!) near Heathrow. We used to joke about the puddles of heavy metals in the car park but not such a joke! At about 10.55am every day we would down tools and go to the window to see Concorde, never got bored of that. No woman could enter the Polishing department alone and, even if accompanied, all the (male) workers shouted, whistled, jeered - all sexist obscenities. It was a real old fashioned combo of office and factory staff and there was a divide. I think the factory staff might have earned more than we did though!