Any one remember Gestetner Stencil duplicting machines? - What a pain they were.

In my first local authority we had a Chief Admin Officer who was a Major in the TA and had an office of his own with a huge leather topped desk, the rest of us were in an adjoining office with all desks lined up as at school facing his office door!   All senior managers were addressed as Mr or Mrs.

When desk top computers arrived I remember one colleague placing the mouse on the screen and, moving it about, exclaiming "well this doesn't work".

We currently have a photocopier which will only accept 1 piece of paper at a time and no feeder.  Our accounts are still largely paid to our suppliers by cheque and all post coming onto site is still opened by a Director or Company Secretary.......!!

Nicola - we also still use the dymo tape for our swipe cards lol

Good thread!

One of my first jobs was on a building site (2000), 17 years young. I was asked to fetch a long weight from the tool store. Being far too intelligent for that old joke the foreman and 4 others put me in a brick layers bath of wet cement and let me walk home in slowly stiffening clothes.

I should of taken the long weight ; ) 

Steve, FABULOUS thread!  :-)  Reading the posts which mention food, loos and the hierarchy has just reminded me of one employer I joined in 1989 which had two canteens, one for the plebs and a smaller one with waitress service for the toffs.  When the site underwent a reorg the 'luxury' dining room was one of the casualties .....  Bless!

Hi Tony,

Ah - my first job - I remember the Gestetner Stencil Duplicating machines too, and the fact that we had to keep the stencils after they had been used so that we wouldn't have to retype them to print more copies off (I did work for a money conscious local authority at the time) - the red liquid you used to correct and seal mistakes, the inky fingers, the missing middles of o, b, p, q, 0, 6, 9,  etc so they showed as black blobs when you used them again - fun times!!

Viv

 

 

When I was 13 I worked in a local petrol station, one of those 'modern' ones that had a shop (but before they were all Spars or TinyTescos or whatever they're called).  I received the princely sum of £1.25 per hour, and, when I had the audacity to ask for a pay rise, got sacked. 

On the plus side there were weeks when, cleaning under the two freezers, I'd find more in loose change that had rolled under than I earned. 

These days I'd earn more per hour, be able to claim unfair dimissal, but get sacked for fraud.  Easy come, easy go, I suppose :)

 

I feel an eBook coming on... or even a mini-series ;)

Keep 'em coming.

S 

 For nostalgic paperboys/girls, go to www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014tfb1

Interesting 5 podcasts. 

On the morning of my first day in the merchant navy on board a BP supertanker at the Isle of Grain refinery, I'd had no training (I joined straight from school) and no induction on board. There was a July summer thunderstorm and a lightening strike set the foremast on fire, just above a potentially explosive gas vent and a ship full of gas. Being naive and unaware of the danger, I accompanied the officer of the watch to use a fire hoseand try to extinguish the blaze. Unbeknownst to me, the rest of the crew were taking giant steps down the gangway to find somewhere safer!

Ignorance is bliss, they say. 

my first day of work was at 15 years old in 1978 where i joined the "documentation department" of a well known insurance company - everything was done by hand and when i had been there for a few months had to prepare a case for debate for the social committee  regarding the pros and cons of introducing a computer system - i was not only terrified at the prospect of "public speaking" but couldnt begin to imagine how computers would impact on the business - when we did get computers our server room covered the whole ground floor with its whirling and clicking wheels and strict temperature control. We also had adding machines (not calculators) that produced a till roll of the results, and all the accounts were written in huge ledgers.

 

god i feel old!!!!

In my first proper job a quiet week was a union boycott of the canteen and I think my most important job was delivering the beer to the union-management meetings.

The HR officer used to recruit with a girlie calendar behind his desk

Hi,

Just thought of another piece of equipment I was trained to use when I started straight from school - the Council switchboard.  It was one of those with holes that 'eyeballs' would flick down to let you know that someone had picked a phone up, then you had 20 pairs of lines that one you plugged into the incoming call and the other into the extension they required, and that was for both external  and internal calls. On a busy day you had lines crossing over and going in all directions and felt like you were tying yourself  in knots.  Quite daunting for a green 16 year old.

 I also had to dial out all external calls, the staff weren't able to dial out themselves, and keep a note of the number and duration of any personal calls they made so they could be charged at the end of the month. 

Ah, isn't technology a wonderful thing.

Viv

So funny!  I remember before leaving school wanting to go to Art College, but was turned down as I did not have arithmetic (Scottish education system).  I was heartbroken so applied to the local Tech to do a Secretarial course - computing was with cobolt and some other such thing with hole punched cards and typing with manual olivetti machines.  when they put me on the golfball thing, I was so heavy handed every letter came out 6 times.  I then went for my first interview after finishing college for a Glaziers in Ayr, they tested my typing and then got me to use a Gestetner - I remember using copious amounts of the pink nail varnish stuff to correct the errors.  They offered me the job £30 a week in 1982.  I turned it down as I thought the salary was way too low and I went off to be an artist in residence.  Oh how things change!!

I remember my first summer job in 1982 before starting university, when I was an "Assistant Temporary Clerkess" in a council welfare department. My job was to hand write names and addresses on books of vouchers to send to families to claim free school clothing. The technological highlight in that office was getting phones that you could transfer or pick up calls from extension to extension!

My first "real" job after university was with an Employer's Association and I was responsible for putting together all the background information for wages conferences. This meant re-basing the RPI and Average Earnings Indexes manually and then drawing very carefully a series of coloured graphs indicating wages comparisons across the construction industry and illlustrating as bar charts how the total remuneration was built up by means of basic pay, overtime and various allowances across the various trades. Oh, and the dizzy technological heights in 1985 of having a dictaphone on my desk!

But how come, with all these amazing improvements in technology, we all seem to be working more hours than ever before at full pelt?

Page 3 calendars were very much in demand during the 70's & 80's and I was sent one every year by our advertising agent. Even back then I considered it a bit non PC to display this in the HR Office but it did enable me to swap it for any other calendar within the large factory and distribution setup of Schweppes Sidcup in South London.

I remember a lot of the aspects noted by other contributors and genuinely noticed one of our very senior secretaries applying tippex to the screen of her newly acquired word processing equipment c 1983. I was working for the BBC in central London at the time with most secretaries still using manual typewriters or if very prilviliged - electric machines displaying just one line of text. This secretary had been particularly favoured to test and evaluate the prospect of word processing for the Corporation and I think she managed to eventually  remove the 'old style' non H&SE Tippex from the small screen  with nail varnish remover.

A few years later I had moved to the finance sector in Jersey  and received a deputation from our secretaries (all in their early 20's and very trendy out going personalities) - that if we made them change to 'word processing' from their electric typewriters - they would all resign en masse! In those days it seems strange to recall that there was not a universal WP system so in our case 'displaywrite' could not be edited or updated in another system so for contracts and lengthy legal documents- the whole version would have to be retyped from the paper option supplied.

My best memory however, goes back to the early 70's when I starterd my HR career with the prognosis of experts and business Gurus (backed up by television programmes such as 'Tomorrow's World') - very seriously advocating that by the end of the milenium (2000 that is) - everyone would only need to work 2 days a week - as computers would be doing the rest  for us !!!

Please keep the memories coming

Kind regards

Vic Tucker, Group HR Director, Altis Partners