It was acceptable in the '80s... Come and reminisce about your first job.

[AgentProvocateur]

I left uni in 1987, and worked in an office. We had a telex machine which was a complete bastard to operate, and although we had computers, most correspondence was done on electric typewriters. In about 1988 or 1989, we got our first fax machine (with a roll of thermal paper) and then in the early '90s we got an internal email system which we all thought was amazing.

My manager was the first person I knew to get a mobile - a huge brick that plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car, and could, I think, only be used in the car.

But what seems most amazing now was the fact that we all smoked at our desks, and we had company ashtrays. Our MD had a box of cigarettes on his desk that he'd hand round at meetings. It seems unbelievable that this was the 1980s and not the 1940s.

We also used to do a lot of business lunches, and we'd often stay in the pub for the rest of the afternoon.

Changed days.

Busters I didn't remember Gerstener stencil, but just looked it up and found a picture and that is what it was! Joined together at the top, it had2 0r 3 layers to it.

I used to do my department's stationery order in the mid 1980s and Gestetner stencils were always on the list. I never knew what they were lol!

I was only born in 1983, but I do remember going into my dad's office with him one morning when I was very little (suspect Mum had come into town to go to the doctor or something). He worked for a building society and I was let through into the back room where they kept the one solitary computer. It must have taken about half a flipping hour to boot up.

They all smoked in the office. And he had an official company suit that he had to wear, with a company tie. I have such vivid memories of hugging him when he came home and smelling the mixture of stale smoke, cold air and vile polyester.

The cyclostyle was also called the Gestetner (invented by him) (in Tottenham London, in 1906) and also called Mimeograph or Mimeo - the stencils were waxed mulberry paper. I told you I've been reading up on it!

Memories!

First job in 1981 - used that copying machine thing. I also had a Commodore 64 as the boss wanted to be the first with everything. I used to program it to make pretty patterns of stars.

Second job - also 81, Nat West. When someone wanted to open an account I had to handwrite the details into a massive book. B90 terminal, yup!

And printing cheque books by hand on this Heath Robinsonesque machine: name and number was embossed on a brass plate, a ribbon of magnetic ink and a nifty double handed action to print each individual cheque!

The boss used to get legless a couple of times a week and proposition the secretary mercilessly. Somehow he wasn't creepy about it. Weird.

I had a Saturday job at the pharmacy my sister worked at full time, I can't even remember how much I was paid tbh, probably about £15-£20 I reckon for the day. I really liked it actually, was ever so slightly mortifying when embarrassed boys were trying to buy condoms though, don't know who blushed more (I was 15 ).

Actually my first job (Saturday) was Woolworths - used one of those tills with the three rows of buttons for £ tens and units. It went 'ker-ching' and everything! The whole shop stank of fertilizer which they sold in the gardening section. My friend had a job on the record bar, I spent most of my time dusting the makeup stands. Music got me through the day though.

My first job in 1981 was secretary to the MD and Engineering Manager, I was 17 and straight out of secretarial college and tight gits only wanted to pay the most junior rates but for somebody who had to have a lot of responsibilty. Looking back I really don't know how I coped. I sat next to the purchasing officer who smoked roll-your-owns all day long.

We had the tea lady, Mavis was her name of course, and she used to cook the lunch for all the managers every day down in the canteen. Remember the giant teapots?

There was a lot of unwanted attention back then and I remember one day our telex machine operator (yes, that was her role) came out of the store room in tears and very shaken up. Nothing happened to the sleazy manager. Nobody said a word but all the girls avoided him.

I actually worked for a company in 2004 that had a tea lady!

I am now going to re watch Ashes to Ashes tonight!
I worked in a shoe shop aged 14 £1.14 per hour

And i remember the wonderful smell of the purple inked duplicated papers, still warm...

I worked as a designer during this time, and as often sent to Hong Kong.

Clearly rememebr very early digital transmission of designs. Staning in front of a computer watching a design download onto a screen. It took about 20 minutes. We were absolutely gobsmacked by it.

Orangesandlemons, my role was in marketing, and it was cromalin proofs with overlays and artwork stored in huge folders.

I'm too young to have worked in the 80s, but my job in my gap year on leaving school in the early 90s was in a publishing house. Some of the guys who worked in advertising sales used to do lines of coke off their desks. Drinking (and getting drunk) at lunchtime was considered acceptable. One of the sales guys had a lambourghini, which he always parked right outside the office, despite parking restrictions. One day a traffic warden turned up and started to write out a ticket, and the guys chucked water from buckets on her out of the second floor window.

Yes, we did most of it by hand then. Remeber once being introduced as "one of the girls who colours in"

We got a huge CAD system just before I left in early 90's. Had an entire room to itself that had to be kept dark and cold all the time. It was like a nuclear winter in there

My first job was after school, in a wee fruit and veg shop where I got paid the grand sum of 50p per hour.
Then I left school and got a job in the mail order dept of a well known company and got the sum of £45 a week, which was standard pay for under 18s at the time (1986/7)

Then I got shown how to work the "word processor" and electric typewriter,a nd had to do eltters to epople and input stock data. Still only got £45 a week for it.
#Then in 1988 at the age of 17/18 i got a job in an old folks home, many a time I'd be left in sole charge of 25-30 residents. Also we had 1 person on to nightshifts, there was no proper lifting and handling or proer health and safety things like there would be now

I worked for an insurance co in the eighties and we all had our own computer terminals connected to the mainframe computer in Scotland.

Fairly frequently the mainframe would "go down". Whoever spotted it first would stand up and call across the open plan office (about 60 of us) "Computer's down!!" to which there would be a collective groan and then a couple of hours of complete idleness. Happy Days

First job, I worked with radioactive sewage - lovely!

Left that and worked in IT.

Katie In the 1980s was designing the changes for an online real-time banking system (Shit! - that will out me). It was the second one that this bank had had, so they were around, just not very common.

As a contractor, worked on the new branch system for one of the high street banks. Some stupid sod had decided to have cheque accounts in the new system, BUT standing order payments were outside it. And, where are most standing orders paid from?? Yes, cheque accounts!

Worked on a 286 - before pentium chips - with Supercalc, a dos-based spreadsheet. You could go to the loo, boil the water in the kettle, and it still wouldn't have finished saving a file. Supercalc was brilliant, cost £80 when Excel was about £400, and in deference to Lotus, you could use Lotus keystrokes as commands.

I still use ctrl-c/v/x, it's just quicker when you're used to it.

My first job was Saturdays in WH Smiths. We had to wear tights but kept snagging them on the huge heaps of books and junk stacked in all the corridors,and it was quite a serious amount of expenditure out of our wages.

My first job out of school was with a taxi company.
I would operate the radio and pick up phonecalls.

It was constant chainsmoking from start of shift to end.

I remember one really quiet Sunday morning I stood on a chair and took a damp cloth to the ceiling...

Big mistake.

It came away like thick black tar dripping off the ceiling.

So I wrote my name in it.

Oh and this was in 2000!

My first job was in 1990 working in the summer holidays in an ice cream and sandwich kiosk. The chain smoking owner used to bugger off home and leave me there. I earned the grand sum of £1 an hour which seemed like riches. I remember taking home £60 a week so worked all the hours. I was 12!

The next year I got £2 an hour because I took over a larger ice cream shop in the chain of crappy shops this woman owned. The girl who previously worked there was very disgruntled by my taking her job and smacked me round the chops.

Re working in offices, I have always worked with computers, and always had some sort of rudimentary email system. I think my only nod to the past was printing out purchase orders on an ancient dot matrix printer which kept breaking, and we were all terrified it would finally give up the ghost as the antiquated DOS based ordering system would only work with this printer (or something).

I have a vivid and stirring hatred for all Lotus based programs. Fucking Lotus notes. How is that still going (I worked for a company LAST YEAR which still had lotus notes, the twats).

I listen in awe as my colleagues talk about life in offices in the late 80s- smoking, getting pissed at lunchtime, typing pools being ruled by harridans, calling managers sir. Like people say it seems like the 40s, not the 80s.

Oh we had real time updates tb. They were just on system that I'd never seen the like of before! And we had a different system for everything and every distribution channel and none of them talked to each other.

We used to get sent monthly print-offs from head office (to all thousand or so branches) that had to be reconciled. This went on until 2006 when The Spanish came with their computer system that still did stupid things especially with bonds

Oh the memories

My first job was in the late 80s at a Chartered Accountants, we had to compile our clients accounts using manual ledgers. They were big old leather bound ones, weighed a ton, and god help you if one of the ledgers didn't balance.

2nd job was mental, the company was in a big old converted mansion house, and as plebs lowly accounts staff we were on the utilitarian ground floor. Middle mamagement were on the 1st floor, (slightly better furnishings/ambience etc), senior managers on the top floor (shag pile carpets, wood panelling). Strictly no trousers allowed for the 'girls'. The owners were addressed as Mr . The women were allowed an extra day off at Christmas, called the Christmas Shopping day (until some of the male staff complained .
It was like upstairs fucking downstairs. It was 1989.

I'm a librarian and fondly remember that foreign academic books (particularly from France and Italy) were sent uncut ... so I spent lots of time cutting the pages open with a paper knife.
I believe that Victorian ladies used to have to cut open the pages of their romantic novels, but in the 1980s?

We still had Lotus Notes in 2009 at the company I worked for. When the company that bought mine out replaced the computer system, including email, us lowly workers were not deemed responsible enough to have our own email!

I went from looking after £55 million pounds of client money, managing national media coverage at a local level and responsibility for a business with £50 million pound turnover and multi-million pound profit to not being considered able to work an email account responsibly or manage my own staff and time Not that this was personal - all us bought out staff were all treated like shite