Things that used to be commonplace in the workplace

[birchesgreen]

Desktop computers being beige boxes, in fact desktop computers full stop. Even people who work mostly in the office get either laptops or those tiny mini-PCs. CRT monitors of course are also now gone.

Dot matrix printers. Infact any impact printers.

Telephones, they've been removed now (in my office anyway). Telephony is done via your PC (which i don't like, the good thing about having a separate phone was that you could "accidentally" unplug it when you didn't want to be disturbed).

 

[deltic]

Bunches of flowers delivered to embarrassed colleagues on Valentines Day
Star phones in conference rooms which had to be moved up and down the room so the person speaking could be heard at the other end - all replaced by video conferencing
Photos of children/pets/partners on colleagues' desk - all swept away by hot desking
Postcards sent in by colleagues when they were on their annual holiday
Christmas cards
Leaving cards and collections in envelopes surreptitiously passed round the office - replaced by e-cards and on-line donations
Chocolates/fudge/biscuits brought back from holidays for the office - no-one in the office to eat them these days
Office romances? Seem to be banned in many firms
Friday after work drinks
Friday lunchtime drinking sessions

 

[Snow1964]

Gloy gum
roller deck with names and phone numbers
receptionists with phone exchange (before direct dial extensions)
adding machines with till rolls
daisywheel printers
telephone handsets with a shoulder rest (before headsets)

 

[Killingworth]

Sealing wax to seal registered letters

Telephone switch board with lines to be connected 'putting you through"

The blind telephonist who instantly recognised regular callers without asking their name.

The coal fired boiler to stoke and rake out.

Suits, waist coat, collar, tie.

Filing cabinets and fiilng

Cash register, kerching

Triilby and bowler hats

The boss was always sir, only later Mr Smith.

Letters to male customers addressed as T Smith Esq

A widow addressed as Mrs Thomas Smith.

Outdoors the night watchman with a brazier and red oil lamps.

 

[birchesgreen]

Bunches of flowers delivered to embarrassed colleagues on Valentines Day
Photos of children/pets/partners on colleagues' desk - all swept away by hot desking
Christmas cards
Leaving cards and collections in envelopes surreptitiously passed round the office - replaced by e-cards and on-line donations
Chocolates/fudge/biscuits brought back from holidays for the office - no-one in the office to eat them these days
Office romances? Seem to be banned in many firms

All these happen in my company still. Smallish business though (about 50 people) so maybe different to a big multi-national.

 

[John Webb]

Off-site computer accessed from a research and development lab by a telex machine.
In the research station I then spent nearly 30 years at:
Ink-pen chart recorders, then cassette data loggers with around 10 channels followed by computer-controlled data loggers and then real-time data processing so you could see what was going on during experiments rather than find out afterwards.
Slide rule > mechanical calculators > electronic calculators > desktop computers > laptops. (Then I retired.)
Tea breaks in the canteen (where much useful information was exchanged with other workers) onto tea ladies and then 'brew your own'.
Individual or perhaps just two or three people in a small office and then moving in the last couple of months I was working to an open-plan office which I detested!

 

[SargeNpton]

Sheets of dry-transfer letters/numbers/symbols (LetraSet) to create presentations and document covers.

 

[swt_passenger]

Overhead projectors and acetate slides.

 

[ChiefPlanner]

Circulating files in folders (read , sign cover slip and pass on) - or just sign and pass on. Ditto for technical magazines to be circulated.

 

[Gloster]

Those envelopes with a series of lines on the front so that they could be reused for passing correspondance around the business: cross out your name/department on the last line used and then write the address of the person/department you were sending something to on the next line and put it into the internal mail. They never seemed to get beyond half-a-dozen uses before the flap became too loose.

 

[Jamesrob637]

People actually in the office Monday to Friday every day rather than the T W A T s of nowadays or people only coming in one day per week/one week per month.

 

[DelayRepay]

Those envelopes with a series of lines on the front so that they could be reused for passing correspondance around the business: cross out your name/department on the last line used and then write the address of the person/department you were sending something to on the next line and put it into the internal mail. They never seemed to get beyond half-a-dozen uses before the flap became too loose.

Internal mail has gone completely in my company. We used to have tonnes of the stuff, now it's all email. On the rare occasion we need to send a piece of paper to another site, it goes via normal Royal Mail.

Actually in my first job in a bank (not quite an office), we had a van that spent the day driving between all our local branches, collecting cheques and other bits of paperwork for processing and dropping off any mail the branch needed to deal with. Now even the cheques get scanned in the branch.

So on a related note, the chequebook and petty cash tin don't seem to exist any more.

 

[Bletchleyite]

So on a related note, the chequebook and petty cash tin don't seem to exist any more.

Don't think I've ever worked in an office with either. The norm is pay and claim back, or purchase orders and invoices paid electronically for large items. Sometimes admins have a corporate card for buying stuff like stationery though.

 

[DelayRepay]

Don't think I've ever worked in an office with either. The norm is pay and claim back, or purchase orders and invoices paid electronically for large items. Sometimes admins have a corporate card for buying stuff like stationery though.

The first office (a small local company) I worked in had both. Invoices were paid by cheque. The chequebook was kept locked in the manager's desk.

Petty cash was used for buying small items of stationery, paying for postage, tea and biscuits(!) etc. It was locked in one of those cash tins and managed by the boss's secretary.

Surprisingly, when I started working in the bank, we had a petty cash tin for paying for small items. It had its own bank account so we topped the tin up by withdrawing £10 or whatever. We also had a chequebook linked to the account which we used sometimes. When we did any fundraising, we'd pay the cash into the Petty Cash account then write a cheque to the charity. Sounds very antiquated now!

 

[McRhu]

In one of my numerous (70 to 80 - I forget) former jobs I worked for a newspaper that still used hot metal slugs to cast body type, and steel letters for headlines, etc, all of which would be manually assembled into 'forms' and tapped down with a mallet. Even then (late 1970s Helensburgh) this process was going the way of the Fell Diesel and the Letterpress apprentices who were being trained up knew that it was all for nothing. A lot of those skills disappeared quite suddenly along with the accoutrements, tools and smell of burning lead (or solder or whatever the hot slug alloy was). In later years (and in another job) I saw a whole team of designers, artists, copywriters, proof reader, typesetters and so on replaced by one man working at a Mac in his living room. Apart from the camaraderie of a busy workplace I missed the physical manifestations job - Letraset markers and Rotring pens, dry transfer lettering sheets (again by Letraset) along with their catalogues of exotic typefaces, scalpels, Cow Gum and so on.

 

[Ediswan]

Dot matrix printers. Infact any impact printers.

This is case where common usage of a term has changed over time. The technology in the vast majority of current printers is dot matrix. Very small dots, laser toner or inkjet.

The contrasting technology to dot matrix is a pre-formed typeface, like a typewriter. These do appear to be defunct. @Snow1964 mentioned daisywheel. There were also band printers, but probably not in an office environment (very noisy).

Impact dot matrix printers are still freely available, many with a parallel port. https://www.printerland.co.uk/printers/dot-matrix Typically used where multiple copies are required. Next time you get a delivery with coloured paperwork, that will likely be dot matrix impact printed.

 

[Lloyds siding]

Sheets of dry-transfer letters/numbers/symbols (LetraSet) to create presentations and document covers.

I use to do a weekly poster to update pollution levels, updated with LetraSet, and then photcopied for distribution by post. In latter years this was done on a computer, saved and then e-mailed out. Distibution was , in theory faster, but my updating was faster with me doing it manually with LetraSet than waiting for the poster to load, updating it, waiting for it to save, and then printing out a copy in case the formatting had gone wrong (again) because of the huge amount of info in little boxes.

 

[telstarbox]

Don't think I've ever worked in an office with either. The norm is pay and claim back, or purchase orders and invoices paid electronically for large items. Sometimes admins have a corporate card for buying stuff like stationery though.

Purchase orders were on a quadruplicate carbon pad when I started - you had to press down really hard with a biro to show the info on all four sheets. The top copy was posted (which had to be franked), the second went on file, third to accounts for recharging to clients and fourth to the person who actually paid it, sometimes by cheque. Now it's just a Word document which is emailed around.

 

[ChiefPlanner]

Office BT dial telephones were secured by a simple dial lock to prevent fraudulent or inappropriate use.

 

[birchesgreen]

This is case where common usage of a term has changed over time. The technology in the vast majority of current printers is dot matrix. Very small dots, laser toner or inkjet.

The contrasting technology to dot matrix is a pre-formed typeface, like a typewriter. These do appear to be defunct. @Snow1964 mentioned daisywheel. There were also band printers, but probably not in an office environment (very noisy).

Impact dot matrix printers are still freely available, many with a parallel port. https://www.printerland.co.uk/printers/dot-matrix Typically used where multiple copies are required. Next time you get a delivery with coloured paperwork, that will likely be dot matrix impact printed.

Yes but not in my office or any office i've been in in the last 20 years, its all laser. I know carbon paper for copies is still available, i bought some this week for my typewriter.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Purchase orders were on a quadruplicate carbon pad when I started - you had to press down really hard with a biro to show the info on all four sheets.

Yep - I remember those although ours were triple copy. I once managed to order an elephant using one of those ( I had a suspicion that the managers were signing them without reading them and I was right... I got a requisition signed for a "grey pachyderm on four legs with two metres of flexible trunking attached". )

 

[gmaguire]

At my workplace we lease two coffee machines. The lease is expiring soon and I’ve heard they’re not renewing it and getting a tea lady instead. I’m assuming it will be additional duty for someone who already works in the canteen.

 

[Jamesrob637]

There's one obvious thing not seen in such large quantities in offices these days:

Workers.

Yes, I visited my old office (and this was Pre-COVID), and it was like the Marie Celeste.

Did you go in on a Monday or Friday just pre-COVID when the T W A T revolution was just getting its wheels in motion?

 

[Phil56]

Carbon paper
Gestetner duplicating machines (no photocopiers when I started work)
Manual franking machines you had to carry to post office to "charge" with postage
Cash, petty cash tins, petty cash book
Invoice, estimate, order books where you took the carbon paper from the back and put it between pages before you wrote on the top.
Tippex, green and red pens, paper glue
Pads of A3 analysis paper (before computer spreadsheets)
Cash wages envelopes
Ashtrays
Company seals
Huge hard back paper ledgers with striped edges
Ink pens
Adding machines with paper rolls and handle (not electric)
"Twinlock" multi-copy invoices, estimates, orders, etc - it was a little box where you pulled through a multipart document from inside the box and wrote on the top of it
Fax machines
Telex machines
Dictaphone recorders and players
Shorthand note books

This was mid 80's so was a pretty antiquated firm, although it was around 50 staff with 4 offices, so hardly small. I think we got our photocopier around 1988 and first computer in 1990. The partners had electric adding machines, but us mere staff had to share the hand cranked manual ones.

 

[birchesgreen]

Pay rises

 

[Lloyds siding]

Did you go in on a Monday or Friday just pre-COVID when the T W A T revolution was just getting its wheels in motion?

No, it was well before COVID....a normal working day...but lots of people were working from home anyway...and a large cohort (including me) had been made redundant..and therefore not replaced.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Did you go in on a Monday or Friday just pre-COVID when the T W A T revolution was just getting its wheels in motion?

I go in every day ( except of course when I have a day off ) and pre-virus there was no sign of any reduction in daily numbers.

Post-virus our daily numbers are recovering; most of the time midweek attendance is more or less back to normal.

 

[johnnychips]

In teaching, when I started in 1982, we had this thing called what sounded like ‘the Bander’. I have never seen it written down. It looked a bit like a small washing machine tub with a handle that you turned. You made a master sheet and it duplicated things like line maps and diagrams you had drawn in colour (or indeed just ordinary writing) and I think it smelt of alcohol. Unless that was the technician you had to ask to do your duplicating for you.

Seriously, can anyone else remember this, and was it just used in schools?

EDIT: and this has made me remember ‘The Gestetner’, which may have been a similar beast for typewritten things.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

In teaching, when I started in 1982, we had this thing called what sounded like ‘the Bander’. I have never seen it written down. It looked a bit like a small washing machine tub with a handle that you turned. You made a master sheet and it duplicated things like maps and diagrams in colour, and I think it smelt of alcohol. Unless that was the technician you had to ask to do your duplicating for you.

Seriously, can anyone else remember this, and was it just used in schools?

Ah! The Banda Machine.

Mainly schools, I think. Yes, it did use alcolhol based inking processes.

 

[Killingworth]

In teaching, when I started in 1982, we had this thing called what sounded like ‘the Bander’. I have never seen it written down. It looked a bit like a small washing machine tub with a handle that you turned. You made a master sheet and it duplicated things like line maps and diagrams you had drawn in colour (or indeed just ordinary writing) and I think it smelt of alcohol. Unless that was the technician you had to ask to do your duplicating for you.

Seriously, can anyone else remember this, and was it just used in schools?

See Wikipedia;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator

Banda, there's a video here - after the ads;