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!

Oh yes, Civil Service flexi was wonderful- managed to get 2 extra flexi days a month off and you could "borrow" on your flexi.

We could also make all the private phone calls we wanted, although after a year or so, we had a memo round asking if the blokes could refrain from ringing the bookies or 0898 numbers.

Loved the civil service flexitime. We had a groper who resided in the stationery office. You had to brace yourself to go in there for a pen as he kind of blocked the escape route. Strangely we never reported it;the eighties were odd like that. I also spent all day surrounded by fag smoke and had many an argument about opening the windows.

My first office job was in the civil service. The whole organisation was a homage to driving itself along on a giant wave of self perpetuated paperwork, photocopying and tea.

PMSL about this and about how much times have changed. The paperwork is now electronic, we scan more than we copy, and we drink more coffee than tea.

Someone mentioned Macros, I remember those!
I also worked flextime but not civil service. The machines were on the walls throughout the office. We used to put each other's in to click up more hours.
The thing about appraisals and monitoring etc is that, in those days, there was NO accountability in the public sector, none at all. Maybe it's gone too far the other way?

I worked in the HQ of a big company and in the morning the tea trolley came round with freshly baked scones and cakes.

I can remember our office getting its first fax machine. one of the partners tried to send a pound note through it to his friend. He seemed to think the pound note would dematerialise and come out on the other side.

Flexi-time!

I took the afternoon off and sat my Cambridge entrance exam in flexi-time I'd built up.

Had a secretary of my own, dictated into Dictaphone a lot, secretary took shorthand dictation sometimes. Telex machine - it was huge and took up a whole office on its own, I had no idea how it worked. The post was sorted and brought to you to go into your in tray. We used the word "Bespeak" a lot in our letters. We went our drinking alcohol on Friday lunch times - 3 pints of Green King for me - and then worked all afternoon. We took our dogs to work, sent secretaries out on a cake run most days. You could smoke in the office. I don't think we worked nearly so hard in those days, lots of chatting and fun.

Yes Davros signature books.

Also had a lovely 3 course meal restaurant.

@elkiedee

They are still using Uniplex in the office I'm working in now.

Drives me nuts as it isn't hooked up to the mouse

@amouse Wow! It seemed a bit dated in 1996.

I worked in many offices and remember manual typewriters you had to bash hard with carbon paper in between sheets of thin paper with a top copy.Typewriter erasers before Tippex papers arrived, followed by liquid Tippex and Snowpake.
A Golf Ball typewriter and typing out page after page of shot points for a big US oil company.
Printing out blue prints on a machine that stank of chemicals, getting a certificate for learning how to fix the Rank Xerox photo copier.
Answering the phones working the switchboard and standing in on reception, another office, much later still had a plug in switchboard but had progressed to dictaphones and my hard earned skill of shorthand was not needed there.
Sorting out tickets and marking the journeys down in a big book at British Rail (office).
Working for the Collector of Taxes as secretary but still being in a shared room with the other typists and the highlight of the day was the tea trolley when we all went out and lined up in the main office.
Writing out by hand cover notes for car insurance.
Sending out hand written reminders for late library books in the company library.
Filing endless letters and copies of documents in walls of filing cabinets.
Answering calls about steel production/cement/electrical and mechanical engineering/transport distribution/life and car insurance and dealing with correspondence and information services on various aspects at various stages of progression from dogsbody to management.

I worked in the grounds of a hospital when I first went to work in 1987 and like all government owned buildings, it had Crown Immunity, meaning were we exempt from planning laws.

Health and Safety was not such a 'thing'.

We were using a piece of machinery still painted utility green from WWII. It had a mercury switch.

We had another piece we had bought after trialling it in 1963.

We lost Crown Immunity, then COSHH came out and all of a sudden things had to comply with legislation.

After losing CI, a number of things changed.

The kitchens closed down for refurbishment because the open sluice from the Mortuary ran down the middle of the kitchen.

The bar had to close at lunchtimes.

Barriers had to go up in the car park as that was where the highly explosive liquid oxygen tank was.

Health & Safety gone mad, I tell you.

Our Tea lady was called Carmen.. I've never forgotten her . She made the BEST cheese scones ever ( and served then warm with butter) and the best cheese and pickle crusty rolls - I dont know how she did it , but the rolls were light but also super crusty, the cheddar was strong and there was frankly more pickle than was necessary..Delish!! .

In the afternoon we had fresh baked cakes!.. It was a good job I was a teenager and never really put on weight on

She use to open the office door twice a day and shout 'Tea, Ladies!' (even though therer were men in the office) and I would always imagine this would herald a pagent of tea ladies dancing through the office. !

This was the 1970s

Ah lovely Carmen, what a woman , .. as I am now nearly 60 I expect she has gone to the great tea trolley convention in the sky..

Our NHS office had a lethal guillotine, without a finger guard. It was designed to be used by right handed people. I am left handed, I often had bruised nails where the cutting blade had slammed down on me.

Also for a time we had a dinky little machine that folded letters into 3 to fit into window envelopes easily. It was more trouble than it was worth because if the paper was loaded a millimetre out of true it jammed. Many hours were spent taking it apart with the tools that came with it.

Also as a 17 year old in first job descibed above one of the Clerical Officers was called Gladys.

Gladys had been there years and everything had to be done her way.. . She was quite nice but seemed so old. She always dressed well and had her hair shampooed and set every week one lunchtime at the hairdressers. (we knew never to try and go to lunch at the same time when she had a hairdresser appointment if it would mean she had to stay in the office or there would be Trouble )..

Anyway I swore I would never be a 'Gladys' ..

I fear now though that I may well be!..

I am the 2nd oldest in the office and I know considered the 'office 'expert' in many ways (but hopefully not the ' office institution' because ive not been there that many years.).

, I spend far too much of my money on clothes etc as my children are grown and mortgage paid off. and do like to dress well , and get my hair done (not shampoo and set , though, I sport a bleached pixie cut which sometimes is pink or blue ) ..

I do get on with the the younger ones and we often go out together , but I do hope they like me more than we liked poor Gladys!!

My Dad used to be in charge of the typing pool. He had a kind of managed early retirement/redundancy when it was decided that people could use computers and do their own typing, so the typing pool was disbanded.

People were furious about being expected to do their own typing, and directors (all men) all insisted on having a secretary (all women) to type for them. So they'd sit in a room dictating, while the secretary typed the letter into a computer, hit 'print', and went to get it (no individual printers, one per room). Because men couldn't be seen to type, y'know.

I worked in an office for three summers when I was at teacher training college.
I did a lot of typing on a typewriter, with carbon to make a copy. I typed on skins for the Gestetner, and then fixed the skin to the machine, set the number of copies and it printed them off.
Very occasionally used the photocopier, which was quite basic and expensive, so sat in the boss' office lest anyone ran off too many copies.
Answered the phone.
Used the adding machine to add up quantities of figures and it gave a paper printout.
Made the tea and took it round when it was my turn on the rota, and washed up afterwards.
Addressed envelopes and put letters in them.
I really enjoyed it.

I'll take you back to 2000 as I think even that is quite scary.

Sat breathing in the smoke of the admin manager who chain smoked daily. Apparently she had shared offices with all the blokes at some point, but they all moved her on as she was the only one who smoked. As office junior I had no power. Horrid woman, but was the only one who knew how to pay the wages and the invoices, so no one spoke up.

Echo waiting for the postman, franked the post for the postman to collect each evening still hate that machine to this day 17 years later.

Copied huge A1 and A0 size electrical drawings on weird photocopier type things door EVERYONE involved in the job. Not sure if they're still a thing, but sure drawings would be emailed a lot more now I imagine. Spent hours trying to decipher electricians handwriting to type quotes and letters. Used a bloody aa road map to plot routes to refit shops across the country.

My personal fave though is that the dial up internet couldn't be used when my phone was plugged in, so I could only use the Internet when my admin colleagues had gone home so I could answer their phone instead.

My Dad was the wages clerk for a building firm in the 1970s. Every Thursday he'd do the rounds of the sites to hand out wages in cash in brown envelopes. Same route every week; a perfect target for robbery but never was.

I've actually seen a microfiche sheet and know what it looks like, but can't recall what it was for, how it was used. Don't know what is telex. I sent my first e-mail in 1982 (it was then called by another name). My dad bought an electric calculator in about 1974, an electric typewriter in about 1975, and the first home computer made its entry in our house in 1979 (I used it for playing games and learning foreign languages, practicing glossary. Diskettes weren't invented so things were stored on magnetic tape in what looked like a plain tape recorder). There's a command Ctrl-X Ctrl-Z to close the program Word Perfect (or was it Wordstar?), everything was launched from a command line. I've known colleagues who have told stories about coffee in the morning and afternoon tea courtesy of a tea lady but have never seen one. Someone wrote "My boss would ask me why I was still in the office if I was there at 5:35" but for me this applies today, still.

Not sure if this counts because I was a child in the 1980s, but I loved seeing office equipment. Some things I remember were:

Microwriter. You typed using only five buttons (or maybe six), which sat under the hand, and you got letters by pressing different combinations of them. There were mnemonics such as "press all" to get p. My dad said that with practice, you could type really quickly.

Answer machines with twin cassettes: one for the greeting, one for taking messages.

The best thing I saw was a plotter: a huge printer which used actual pens to draw diagrams, one pen for each colour, and it moved them robotically, and really quickly.

Later as an adult I worked in an IT department: the floor was higher than the rest of the building, and there was a spiky device used to pick up squares of the floor, so that we could crawl underneath to get at the network connections!

I first worked in an office in the 90s but some of this is familiar. I remember my mum (a teacher) using Banda to make copes and writing out transparencies for the overhead projector.

I started work in 1987 in a design office.
I learned to do technical drawing with draughting pens on a big drawing board and take the drawings (negatives) to the copy shop for printing. Anything "printed" looking like report covers involved Letraset or pasting things together.
If you wanted a letter, fax or memo or even report you wrote it out on a piece of paper and the secretary typed it. If it was important she used the Word Processor (or to be precise she refused to touch the word processor so we had to get in a temp who like me is still with the company 30 years later).
YY to internal mail envelopes.
You phoned up people and wrote a record of the phone call
We did calculations on squared pads - there were pre printed pads for everything in fact, in pencil. Still being able to do pencil calcs properly laid out is the mark of a true engineer IMO! We had one technical computer.
Letters had a pink blue and yellow copy and the Pinks were circulated around the senior management in a dayfile so everyone knew what was happening.

I still have some of the reports from those early days. They were so slim. I think there is MORE paperwork now. Words are cheap.

Oh and if we wanted to visit a site we chucked our boots in the car and pitched up there. No health and safety and risk assessments.