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.

Blimey - apart from all the smoking, shite IT and casual sexism I have remembered a stonker.

My first proper job in the mid 1980s was working for an organisation that manufactured military vehicles. We sold them to many international customers. I was referred to as an 'inky finger' as I wasn't an engineer but on the whole I was treated very well compared to some on this thread. All my managers were lovely, it was just some of the senior and junior engineers who were arseholes.

I was one of two clerical assistants in my department, we were both young in our late teens and were both loved up with our then boyfriends. We had a group visiting from Egypt where we hoped to sell them lots of very expensive kit. One of the senior engineers took her and me aside and asked if we would mind accompanying the group of Egyptians to a meal and a nightclub one evening as it might help to secure the sale. He also advised us that if were extra specially 'friendly' there might be a nice watch in it for us but that our bosses would be very impressed with us.

We were both offended and horrified and told him to fuck off straight away. We also reported it to our boss and he got the arse kicking from hell. I must stress that this was not the way that the organisation normally operated, it was just one fuckwit who thought he could manipulate junior female staff to get ahead.

Moved on long since and am more senior than him now anyway. Mwah ha ha ha!

When I was 14 I worked as a volunteer in a council run 'old peoples home'. Obviously no thought of risk assessments for young workers in those days - my duties included escorting residents to the toilet, giving them bed baths and even laying out dead bodies .

My first proper job as a 16 yr old in 1985 was as a dental nurse on a YTS scheme. £26.25 a week for 40 hours. In my first week I had to go down to the scariest cellar to develop xrays - working in the dark on my own with chemicals having had 10 minutes training

I worked in a medical lab,doing diagnostic testing.

I remember having an ashtray next to my analyzer and smoking ,drinking tea and eating snacks and lunch at the bench.

I remember not wearing gloves and wiping the blood soaked tip of the pipette after each use with a kimwipe that got so soaked in blood it would stick to my bare hand ( EWWWWWWWW).

We used to mouth pipette and my friend got hepatitis after she swallowed a mouthful of blood by accident.We used to dread getting sperm counts in cos they had to be collected in the bathroom on site,delivered to the lab still warm and then mouth pipetted into a microscope chamber for counting

We used to draw blood wearing no gloves and using non safety needles,an accidental needle stick was no big deal and considered an occupational hazard, you didnt even have to make up an incident/accident report if you got 1

We used to bring our lab coats etc home and wash them with our household laundry

Its a wonder any of us survived :o

I was 15, and got my first job as a waitress... Only to be told that my skirt was too long (knee length) and my blouse too high cut, and that when I next came to work I should find something to wear which would make the customers come back

Actually I'm not sure that was acceptable even in the 80s (this was at the very tail end though - maybe I missed the 'heyday' when even this would've been fine .

Happy days

db
xx

Ah yes. Smoking in the office, pub lunches. Sit up and beg typewriters, followed by one shared computer for the whole office (DOS). Typing on triplicate paper - if you made a mistake the whole lot had to come off, separate the three sheets, tippex them separately. Gestetner printers.

Writing memos! Can't remember the last time I got a memo...

Writing minutes of meetings, and listing people by title: Mr Brown, Miss Aspen, Mrs Elephant etc.

Union meetings in company time.

My first job when i left school was in Tesco Garden Centre in the summer of 1989. I was sixteen and on £65 pounds a week. It wasnt bad money for a young person back then.

I had a job in the city in the late 80's and got seriously groped by one chap(hands up my skirt and erection pressed up against me) I never thought about complaining but after slamming my stiletto heel down on his instep and hot footing it back to my office I then worked out how to get my own back.
I wrote checks for his expenses and he would leave the form on my desk when the office was empty so every second one I would shred and deny all knowledge of it's existance.
If it hadn't been authorised I would remove the biggest receipt so that wouldn't get paid. He must have lost thousands over the next two years.
Loved the job though.

Was a 'Saturday Girl' in a shop in the 70s. There was a series of power cuts and we continued working - by candlelight. Imagine H&S at the thought of naked flames in a stockroom full of paper and card and inflammable materials.

theoldtrout - similar experiences working an a lab - eating and drinking while using toxic chemicals, mouth pipetting same toxic chemicals , surprising we are all still alive. Did learn never to go and work in the dark room with X, unless you wanted to have your tits felt.

What a fabulous thread, thank you OP.
My first full-time job was as a typist/secretary at age 17 in 1984 at a govt funded scientific establishment. What halcyon days they were. Golfball typewriter, RSA III 60wpm touch typing, was useless at shorthand but fab at audio so boss would dictate onto tiny cassettes that I would pop into my player and stick headphones on and operate the pedal with my foot to stop/play the thing while I typed up the memo/letter/report.

The photocopier was enormous and didn't have a sorter. If you needed multiple copies of a report for a committee meeting you copied one page at a time and then turned round to the table behind and laid out each sheet and then copied the next page and then sorted that out onto the pile on the table, thus collatting the copied document by hand. Took forever!

We also had a tea lady who came round with a trolley twice a day. She was also the cleaner and daily polished our lovely black telephone so it shone. There was also a bun-van that came round to each building in the morning with rolls and cakes. And smoking in the offices too.

After a couple of years the secretaries were upgraded from IBM golfballs to fancy Word Processors. The printeres were huge and sat in special tables with big hard plastic covers over them because they were so loud. The word processing system had to be booted up each morning using big floppy discs in the admin office and we took turns to be in early to start it up because it took ages.

And we had to go on training courses to AES in London to learn how the use the word processing system. Four of us girls went at a time, chauffered up by the MD's driver, staying overnight in a hotel and having and absolute blast and pissup in Covent Garden (Punch & Judy pub, heaving with late 80's yuppies in Barbers with brick-sized mobile phones) and then just about manage to get the tube back to our hotel. All on company expenses, joyous.

And when a working lunch was ordered in for a meeting there was always small cans of pale ale for them to drink!

And Friday lunchtimes were spent religiously at the pub, usually managing to fit three rounds of drinks in and feeling slightly tipsy all afternoon.

All pretty unthinkable now. Thanks for bringing back the memories.

Yes I still use the cntl B shortcuts - my (badly made) point was that back in the 80's these commands would appear on the screen as you typed.

There was no print preview type screen to show you how your work "looked" it was more like lines of code surrounding your letter telling you what you had input.

You had to cross your fingers when you printed that you had remembered to start and end your bold or italics or whatever as needed.

Now when you use Ctrl-B you can see the bold and how that will look when you print. This was not the case in the 80's

My first Saturday job in the mid 80s was in a local butcher/deli/posh provisions type shop. The manager used to 'joke' at the end of the day when he turned the light off in the ladies' toilet "One last sniff of the toilet seat [exagerrated wink]"

In my first real job two of us were smokers and used to smoke in the open plan office, none of the non-smoking management ever batted an eyelid.

I had a holiday job in a record shop that I'd go back to every holiday in the late 80s & early 90s. We all smoked behind the counter while we served customers! I was considered posh for having Marlboro Lights whereas the others preferred JPS black. The door to the shop was open all the time, even in rain or snow, to encourage shoppers to step inside (or to clear the air from smoke perhaps, now I think about it?).
I was told off for cutting my hair short. The owner told me he'd only employed me because I had long hair.
When Freddie Mercury died we had to re-price all the secondhand Queen records to astronomical figures.

My first Saturday job I worked in the food hall in Littlewoods. The first day I worked on the sweet counter - no pic n mix back then. I had to add everything up in my head because the till couldn't do it. After that I worked on the deli counter. No tongs or gloves - we just used to turn the bag inside out and put that over our hands. 30 years on I can still judge a 1/4 lb of naice ham by sight. And a lb of streaky bacon.

My first proper job was as a trainee accountant and we weren't supposed to wear trousers as the clients apparently didn't like it.

Sorry on my phone and somehow posted to soon

I was going to say we did all our accounts prep and audit papers by hand in pencil. We only use the very scary computers to input the final figures so that it could churn out a set of sccounts which we then checked and took to the secretaries to do amendments. The computer package couldn't be customised at all.

When I first started one of the partners sent me out in my car with a pad of paper to go round all the industrial estates and business parks to make a note of all the businesses in the area. Then I had to go through the yellow pages to find their postal addresses so that they could be used for marketing purposes. It was a horrible job but I made a fortune in petrol expenses. Google has put paid to that little perk - what took me dats could probably be done in an hour or two now.

I worked for a large mail order catalogue in Worcester and there were 3 canteens - the plebs one (I went to that one!), one for middle management and the directors canteen and I remember someone who worked in the kitchens saying all the food was cooked separately - even if we were all eating boiled potatoes that day they would all be cooked in different pans!

Worked in a bank from 1986 to 2003. Back in the beginning, my morning duties involved filing copies of customers' statements into plastic boxes - hoiking up trolleyfuls of grey plastic filing boxes from the vault downstairs (there was a lift at least!), filing the statements in, then taking them all back down at the end of the day. Every so often (6 monthly?) we had the task of putting them into those binder things with 2 posts to put through the punched holes. If a customer wanted a photocopy of a statement over a year old you hand to manhandle this 4 inch thick binder onto the photocopier and hope it copied ok! Eventually we moved onto the technology of having copy statements sent to us on microfiche. Long time later it was all computer based.

I remember the signature cards - having to check the card for every customer who came in to cash a cheque. And checking every cheque that came into the branch over £1000 for the signature.

Cancelling the clearing - checking the date/words and figures/that there was a signature on every cheque, having to initial each one. But NEVER in green ink as that was the colour the branch inspection team used.

Writing notes on i-sheets, every time a business customer called, we had to handwrite a note of the conversation onto this A3 card, they were all filed in alphabetical order. Likewise this was the main record of what overdraft they had, what loans they had etc. Smaller businesses had i-cards, A5 version of the same thing. (i for "information" sheets - sadly they were not a funky Apple product!)

And when I first started, the 4 of us new starters (2 male, 2 female) were taken for a chat with the office manager, who said that as we had A levels, we should think about doing our Banking Exams, "this applies more to you boys than the girls". It gave me great satisfaction when one of the boys didn't even pass his probation period, and I did actually get my ACIB. (Qualification that no longer exists, think they do a Financial Services degree now)

My first pay packet after tax in 1991 was £497.07, less about £44 a month for an all zone Travelcard so I could get to work, and £160 a month for childcare, so I had £293 a month left to play with.

Now after three mot degrees, 20 years more experience, plus tax, childcare and commuting costs I have -£58 a month left to play with.

three more degrees

Life Insurance 1988, earning £3963pa. You started off as a 'junior' and your job included going to the typing pool and collecting the typed up letters and delivering them to the correct people. And taking the drafted letters back to the typing pool. There was a buzzer that sometimes went, which was the MD, needing something delivered, there were always fights of 'you go!', 'no, you go!' when that happened cos everyone was scared of going and doing something wrong. Everyone smoked in the office, and more senior people were called Mr rather than by their first names.

When I got promoted to an actual role, we had one computer between 15-ish people, using Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect. You had to be the next grade up to be allowed to use it. However, I was the proud owner of a massive desktop calculator for doing the Very Hard Sums that I spent my day doing. Some lucky people had paper rolls in their calculators, but I didn't. . I do recall we spent an awful lot of time capering, and nipping along the road to
Crawfords (precursor to Greggs) for cakes.

My first job was as a secretary on a weekly magazine. I was the only one in the office with an electric typewriter - all the journos had manual typewriters - oh the noise!! When we finally went computerised we all had to go on a course to learn about ergonomics and how to avoid Repetitive Strain Injury (it was going to be the next big thing!). Some high-tech contributors would send in those big floppy discs with their articles on, but most people used to send hand written things or manually typed pages, no email in those days of course so we had to re-type it all, what a bore ...

Worked in the office at Tower Records. I don't actually recall doing much work just being taken to lunch a lot. We used to have parties in the office and I remember the police telling us off for having the big windows open dangling our legs out onto Piccadilly Circus and drinking copiously, actually I've just remembered some poor PC marching through the shop up to the office and handing my friend her bra back which had fallen out the window. we weren't stripping she just had a spare outfit in the office.

I worked in the City in the early 70s and used to wear those skinny rib sweaters. I remember being told to wear a tight jumper and sit at the front desk. Also, when I left, there was an ode to my boobs in the company newsletter. Oh for the good old days before breastfeeding 4 children... (You may have noticed I am not one of the PC brigade)

I had a job clearing tables at a service station in 1989. It was awful - the smell was bad but it was just so mindnumbingly boring. And the restaurant had this crap "mountain lodge" theme, which included a fake waterfall which I broke by dropping a metal teapot into it (by accident. Probably. Anyhow, no one found out it was me). The one highlight was Michael LeVel (Kevin off Corrie) stopping there once. But actually, I think I may have been out sorting the bins and missed it (and hence imagined it by way of recompense. I get quite confused these days).

Getting sacked as a tea lady, working in the kitchen at the London office of Moët et Chandon and going home every day pissed from finishing up leftover champagne, working opposite Harrods when the bomb went off, taking 7 hours to do 2 hours worth of filing( was warned to slow down and make it last. Then I graduated and worked in a hospital, everyone smoked in the ward sister's office, doctors were right even when they were blatantly wrong, and seeing the first HIV patients appear- they were so badly treated. Things really have got so much better.