What was office work like before the internet? (company, temp, school)
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I am lucky/unlucky enough to have been on both sides. I started my career just as computers were getting more popular but before internet, email, and cell phones.
I have to say I was more productive back then. The internet is a huge distraction. Yes it gives you some quick research, but people spend far more time on personal stuff than office stuff.
I also missed the time when if you were out of the office or home that was really the end of your day. Now you're on call all the time.
I did all my interaction on the phone, lots of messages left, this is nearly completely eliminated by email.
As great as the internet is is just as bad of a distraction, I guess its a net 0 for productivity. But a huge gain over shipping things via FedEx and US Mail.
So, before the Internet, office workers would kidnap their boss, chain him up in their basement, and take over the office?
Hahaha...that's why its called a comedy! The general idea of office workings, ie typewriters, mainly the women doing "office duties", including getting the coffee, etc and not having the Internet, it shows an example of what it was like.
Also I reckon in the 1980's and even today that there was quite a few people who would of loved to do that to the boss!
I love this thread. When I think of how offices were back in the day, I think of mad men.
I really didn't like how sexist and openly racist the men were at the office but everything else (type writers, cigarettes) makes me wish I could travel in time for a day.
I love this thread. When I think of how offices were back in the day, I think of mad men.
I really didn't like how sexist and openly racist the men were at the office but everything else (type writers, cigarettes) makes me wish I could travel in time for a day.
I hear you! Phones ringing, typewriters clacking, messages written on little pink sheets, inter-office mail envelopes brought by the mail clerk, liquid lunches by the bosses all expensed. It's funny to think back on how many men drank their lunches and drove back to work and no DUI's or accidents that I knew of.
You actually worked a full day, not much goofing off except for the occasional walk over to someone's desk. Lunch and breaks were for gossip, etc. Yup, if you smoked no one cared or complained. You sat at your desk and smoked away.
I remember the time even before liquid paper (white out), which was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith of The Monkees. Remember typing with carbons and having to put a piece of paper between the papers and carbon paper so it wouldn't smudge. The day I got a typewriter with a correct key was like heaven.
The internet is a huge distraction at work, especially Facebook. Word processing and Excel made life much easier and you get a lot more done in a shorter period of time. I still find myself getting up to talk to a coworker instead of sending an email sometimes. I've seen many an email get people into trouble.
I remember standing around the water cooler talking gossip.
Watch the 1980 comedy movie called "9 to 5" starring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda etc and you'll get the general idea of what happen before the internet!
In 'The Apartment' a movie from the 60s with Jack Lemmon, they show the office Christmas party and it was crazy. They were drinking and smoking and fooling around right there in the office! I can't even imagine that happening right in the office nowadays let alone at the company Christmas party.
Was that what office parties were really like back then? Are we so uptight nowadays that we wouldn't even think to celebrate like that at our offices? Or anywhere, for that matter!
Well first off there were a lot more jobs! When I entered the workforce in the summer of 1978 we had word processors; WANG and MagCard come to mind. In the 80's I worked in a place that had QYX (Exxon) and Vydec word processors where all your work was saved on a 5 or 8 inch floppy disk; easily ready for revisions. In the late 80's we got the first HP Touchscreen computers with 2 3-1/2 inch disk drives but these only had something like a 9 inch screen. You ran your programs (one at a time) from DOS on the left and saved your work on the right disk. As mentioned earlier, this automation eliminated a lot of jobs and is part of the reason Admin Assistants have few opportunities today. If we needed to do research we called the info line at the library! And smoke, yes, we did, lots of us, me included! I know for a fact that some at one employer were smoking pot in the stairways of the skyscraper we worked in. Times sure have changed!
In 'The Apartment' a movie from the 60s with Jack Lemmon, they show the office Christmas party and it was crazy. They were drinking and smoking and fooling around right there in the office! I can't even imagine that happening right in the office nowadays let alone at the company Christmas party.
Was that what office parties were really like back then? Are we so uptight nowadays that we wouldn't even think to celebrate like that at our offices? Or anywhere, for that matter!
Internet is the best thing that ever happened to office workers. You can never be bored and talk to all your co workers and friends family and kids without the boss ever knowing.
I started working in the stone age, basically a few years after the WTC was built.
We used to spend a lot of time on the phone talking to friends, thus having the bosses yell at you.
People smoked at their desks in the office until about the mid to late 1990's.
Not as many cubicles like today. No computers at all, everything was manual. No faxes wither.
Quip machines (fax) came about 1984 somewhere around there.....
There were no answering machine thus the phones would be ringing all day long.
We didnt have radios on our desks, we had "Muzak" piped in through the ceiling speakers in every office.
generally each office was a whole entire floor with seperate little rooms for the bosses, usually with windows.
The working hours were 8-4
9-5 10-6
now we have the 8-5 crap. You would think with all the modern technology that we woruld work less hours, yet it seems as though people work more hours. Not me of course. I am too old to care at this point.
the medical plans were much better back in the day though, we had no deductible, more medicines were covered, there were no referrals and all that crap, there was no deductions in your pay, the companies supplies the medical as part of your benefit package.
It was fun working in manhattan back in those day, but not so much anymore.
If you worked in a multiple floor office or hospital, you might see a pneumatic tube system which could send paperwork up the tube to different floors.
A lot done on paper. Intercoms were used as well as inter-office mail system and even pneumatic tubes (we still use that system). As well as landline phone. I remember a job where I worked switching over from doing reports handwritten to putting them on an early generation computer in DOS. Then a statewide computer report system came out with early windows and we all thought that was great. I can remember doing reports/paperwork on typewriters and word processors. Right now, where I am, for being "paperless" we sure use a lot of paper.
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