A thread of old-fashioned office procedures no longer used

[Hunting 784561]

Keeping your business contacts on a 'Roladex'.

Clicking a lit switch to choose a line when making a phone call.

Reading business records on a microfiche.

 

[Stoo82]

Saying 'super', 'smashing' and 'great'.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

Sharpening those damn quills was always a pain. Sharpening my typing finger hurts.

 

[Titanic]

Chatting to the tea ladies, who twice a day brought round a trolley with proper tea, made in a pot, and served it in cups and saucers... with standard or 'management' biscuits !

 

[Hunting 784561]

Company cars. Must be long gone by now.

My Dad got a company car at the fairground where he worked, but the electric pole wouldn't fit under our garage door.

 

[westy]

Faxes

 

[Super Steve Earle]

Faxes

Still use 'em in my office every day

 

[Super Steve Earle]

I used to enjoy tieing brown paper packages with string for registered post. Nicely finished with melting wax over the knot and stamping it with the office seal. Happy days.

 

[westy]

Still use 'em in my office every day

Good drills. The fax is an underrated bit of Kit.

 

[Gwylan]

Chatting to the tea ladies, who twice a day brought round a trolley with proper tea, made in a pot, and served it in cups and saucers... with standard or 'management' biscuits !

Ah bliss. The luxury of the mid-morning tea break. I'd quite forgotten that.

 

[simmo]

Smoking within offices. At my first office people were allowed to smoke before 10am and after 4pm. I Used to sit opposite a woman whom smoked like a chimney I knew exactly when it was 4pm.

Typists.

I haven't seen one of those orange internal mail delivery things for a long time either, do they still exist?

 

[pasty]

Definitely smoking. I have theory that you can spot someone who used to smoke in their office by how much they (don't) use a mouse. For instance, if I need to create a new folder in a window, I immediately hit (ALT) F, N, F rather than use the mouse to click the menu buttons. Thats because using a mouse with a fag in your hand was quite tricky! I know so many keyboard shortcuts of the top of my head because of that.

 

[Icy Gull]

The Telex, that was a fun bit of kit, typing out the message which translated into holes on a long strip of paper which you then fed into to machine to send it. I remember when faxes 1st come out and how gobsmacked i was that you could send an image from one side if the world to the other in seconds.

 

[desprateseagull]

What were those amazing tube thingummys they used to have in big department stores where money was sent from the shop floor to the admin offices and paperwork vice versa. A bit like an intranet but made out of brass and glass. I vaguely remember seeing them in the Coop in London Road, Hanningtons and maybe Vokins.

money chutes? i think last seen at the old sainsburys, where aldi is now.

 

[desprateseagull]

sending temps / new staff on tea rounds, or a hunt for cans of 'scotch mist' paint, etc.. one smart alec actually found a 'glass hammer' (actually clear toffee, but near enough)..

 

[desprateseagull]

also-

dictating letters for / copping off with someone from the 'typing pool', in any large firm..

internal mail system

petty cash / written memo's

 

[bristolseagull]

this is brilliant, obviously none of you work in a solicitors office- we still do ALL of these!!

in fact I have a little tin of treasury tags in front of me right now

 

[Gully]

Gestetner machines.

In the days when photocopiers were something you saw on Tomorrow's World, your average office clerk had to make up a template and send it to the printing office whenever more than a couple of copies of a document were needed. Bear in mind that this template couldn't contain errors and had to be produced with a manual typewriter...never a favourite job.

 

[Norman Potting]

"A bit like an intranet but made out of brass and glass"

The mind boggles. Many supermarkets still use a pneumatic tube system to send money from the tills to the cash office but I am sure that a contraption with pulleys and wheels was more fun.

.... But back to the thread. Having a secure job with a defined promotion path and no fear of being randomly outsourced or having the name of the business changed on a regular basis. How very old fashioned that now seems.

Faxes. A colleague (and a fairly senior one at that) photopied his face, added a "help I'm trapped in here" speech bubble and transmitted it from the upstairs fax to the downstairs one. Another one (admittedly mad as a very mad thing indeed) "mooned" the staff at the NatWest opposite during a quiet moment, fortunately we were on the first floor.

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Punch girls ... who used to do all data entry, copying it from hand written entries on green lined sheets of paper. Twice, to make sure the data was accurately transcribed.

And they used to be forced to take regular breaks, during which they sat around in a circle ... knitting.