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.

My dh still uses Lotus Notes - huge multinational, household name company !

My first job was in 1985, but tiny shop and lovely.
When in 1990 I started a holiday job as a psychiatric nursing assistant, boy, I came into the real world ! We handed out cigarettes about 10 times a day, which the patients would go and smoke on the ward (no smoking room) and staff members would join them. If a patient went missing from the locked wards, then staff from every ward would be sent to join the search party. I remember standing there, aged 18 in my uniform dress, at 8pm getting issued with a torch to go and search by the river for some bloke who had absconded Not much risk assessment there !

Good lord at having a holiday job in a psych ward.

Funnily enough the two companies which I have worked for which use Lotus Notes are huge, valuable american-owned multinationals. Why they still use bastarding lotus notes I will never know (cheap, presumably).

Colleague: 'I have just sent you a note'

I bet they just do it to piss you off GetOrf

And yes, cheap as chips.

Yes. It is all about me.

I know it sounds incredibly sad, but when you start the first day at your new company in a sparkling new job and realise they use bloody lotus notes, you know that your IT equipment is going to be a bag of shit, and it is depressing.

The last company I worked for didn't enable to wireless on the company laptop. I was expected to work all hours and had to sit at home with a great big cable running through the house from my laptop to the router, tripping everyone up.

Mine was so tight they wouldn't buy an extra flat screen monitor (all of £200 or so). Instead the Head of Projects connected up an old monitor in yellowing dirty white plastic to the terminal. I bet his hotel bill was more than £200. It looked like something out of Wall-E. This was client facing too...

But they also used to send a cabbie from Yorkshire down to pick up and deliver laptops. I worked in London. The same cabbie would go to Cornwall or Scotland

This was 2009. And yes, Lotus Notes all the way there!

Getorf - dh's last laptop didn't have wireless either. And although his role involves a lot of time on site, they don't have ipass. And after very long negotiation, his team have just got Blackberries. He writes cheques for £10million a month or so...

It was a proper old asylum - now it looks like this. My parents apparently didn't think I'd last a day !

That is nuts.

In the company where I had lotus notes and a crappy non-wireless enabled laptops, I was also not allowed to have a blackberry (so couldn't read emails on my phone and had to plug the bollocking laptop in). They also used to fly people round the world at the drop of a hat. In any other company where you would set up a conference call - nope, you had to fly to Taiwan or New Jersey or wherever. And loads of people had company cars - really nice ones as well, Audis and BMWs. It made no sense to me that they were so profligate in one area but tights as a gnats arse in others.

Where BIL works his boss has a secretary/PA who he dictates his emails to and gets to do all his letters and photocopying because he cannot type or work the computer. I am always astonished at the waste of money and that he is not retiring until later this year!

Now I think about it dh's last laptop used to have to be plugged into the router. He works for a mutli-national where they too will spend ££££ flying people around and holding "events" but getting a new blackberry or whatever is a nightmare. He works remotely too

My first job paid £0.50 an hour. All the staff were paid that. My parents took over as managers and our wages doubled to £1.

Felt as rich as Midas

We used to call those machines banda machines, Horses, don't now know why, but as ateacher they were great as we had a photocopy limit of about 20, which with 32 in class was not much good. They took ages to fill out tho' and were rubbish if you made a mistake!
This was around 1990, I think.
We also still used BBC computers and believed we were cutting edge when our school got one (between 250) Archimedes!

I think the person mentioning ctrl-B was saying that those commands were printed on the screen in front of her. Think most of us use the shortcuts!

I still love the thrill of Shift +F3.

Control P was the evil one as that's what would make you end up printing reams of paper off without being able to cancel.

I worked at an engineering company in the late 80's and remember one of the directors saying publicly that 'women shouldn't be in engineering, you know". I was also at a meeting taking notes once when the place was fully of men smoking, the air had a blue hue, I couldn't breathe and had the mother of all migraines with the smoke and no fresh air to breathe. They had to send me home.

Where I worked there was always a funny smell by the bin and it turned out it was unfortunately a dead body smell

FloFlo Dare I ask what was in the bin?

I had the 'women shouldn't be in engineering' as well, in the 2000s.

He questioned my credentials, and I asked him to step outside (in a corridor which led to the shop floor and goods inward). I gave him a bollocking, the detail of which I can't remember but I do remember finishing it with 'is that in any way unclear?' at which point I swept off like Professor Snape. I remember seeing out the corner of my eye loads of chaps from goods in and stores gaping to see young getorf haranguing one of their senior projects blokes. Ha! Fuck 'em.

That big copying machine with sticky stencils we called the "The Roneo" - we had one in our school library for printing off handouts.

Great thread.

Oh, the good old days! My first pay packet was £301.39! I still remember it to this day and that was 1985! (Can't remember what I was watching on the TV before the aderts came on though! )

Along with my salary, I got about £10 worth of Luncheon Vouchers too and me and the girls would blow it all on a big slap up meal on the last Friday of the month!

Our photocopier machine was the full length of the room, with the stencil thing and a collator on the end. It used to take hours to do what would take 5 mins now!

Nice one GetOrf . My next holiday job after the above was at a major nuclear physics research site, and on the whole, enormous site I didn't see another woman who wasn't in admin - so it was a bit of a shock to see me on the 'active' floor. At the time they were doing some building work, so it was full of builders, engineers, and physcists, many of whom thought they could embarass me but of course my previous job meant this was impossible I found snapping my gloves on as I suited up while fixing them with a special look was most effective. Ah, the memories...

Well done Getorf and Dibbler for setting the chauvinists straight. Women shouldn't do engineering? Please...

Having said that my dd said that the science club at school was 'just for boys really' so perhaps the message still hasn't got through.

at CMOT snapping the gloves on.

I also worked in a company (making missiles and equipment for submarines) which was the vast majority male. The women there all worked in admin apart from me in engineering and another young woman in project management. The senior blokes were all ex naval commanders. They didn't know what to do with us so belittled us. Bless them. It was good actually because it made me as hard as nails.

Well, not really that hard as nails, as soon as I swept off after haranguing that bloke I went straight to the loo and cried my eyes out. . But he never knew I cried.

Goodness me .....I am a "trained health care professional" working in the "public sector" where we have recently "upgraded" to "computer systems"....there is approx 1 ancient pc per 5 - 8 staff,none of which use word...wireless unheard of...and I send faxes many times a day,to update our records dept......don't get me started on photocopiers or printers....or sexual harrassment and antiquated hierarchy
Some of the offices circa 1980 sound positively space-age to me........(I am 43...)

We are still using Lotus Notes - didn't realise people thought that was old hat

My first thought, like several others, was the people sitting smoking at their desks (I worked in a bank when I left school).

My mum used to do my dad's typing at home. Carbon paper, before tippex she used little squares of correcting paper you held over the mistake and typed the same letter again.

I was a v. junior secretary in a university. Started '87 I think. Told off for wearing trousers. Word-processor introduced while I was there - Locoscript on an Amstrad. Funny little discs that went in the side next to the screen. I loved it, much better than my dad's computer which didn't have WYSISYG.

Turning the machine on and getting the C prompt and having to type in what you wanted. In lurid green.

I still ctrl b, ctrl c, ctrl v. Much quicker.

Photocopying millions of memos 23 times, for each member of the department. And taking the post round twice a day to 23 offices, mostly to deliver the memos. I got a lot of exercise!

Oh yes and if you were working on a long document - You'd tell the computer to go the end of it and make yourself a cup of tea. By the time you came back it would have got there.

I was typing up someone's thesis and he did move his chapters around a lot. It took me hours just moving around the document, hardly spent anytime actually typing.