Passing the time

[caddyman]

Hmm. LJ has been a bit pants today; loading slowly, eating responses and doing its own thing with formatting. All this with the speed of an arthritic gnu, too. This is what some of us pay our money for.

The trouble is, it is times like this that I realise just how much I depend upon LJ to keep me sane at work; I refer back to it quite a lot just to relieve the monotony that is the working week. Strangely, I cannot remember what I used to do in its place before I used LJ, more generally, I cannot remember how I relieved the tedium in those dark office days before the arrival of teh intarweb. I must have done something, but what it was eludes me completely.

I recall that in the days before computers in the office, back in the early 90s and into the dark days of the 80s, we used to have heaps of paper everywhere, unlike today’s paperless offices, which have er, heaps of paper everywhere. Without even typewriters, we had to write everything by hand or dictate it (the latter at which I was superbly useless) and drafting even the shortest letter resulted in multiple rewrites and the death of half the Amazon rainforest. I suppose all that took up so much time that we didn’t have to worry about entertaining ourselves when the work flow ebbed. Plus I was somewhat younger then and we would disappear down to the pub more often.

I do recall the excitement that was occasioned by the first batch of “Liberators”, the precursors of laptop PCs, which had enough memory to hold ten – count ‘em, ten – pages of WordPerfect text. Then there were the very noisy dot matrix printers which had massive sound baffles that took up an entire corner of the office and made a noise like a consortium of agitated woodpeckers arguing.

I have discovered, said he moving off in a completely unrelated direction, that I have a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for eating Marks & Spencer choccy biscuits. I may be sick later.

Comments

[drjohnsilence.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the time we spent correcting things we got from the Typing Pool and then sending them back down again. The number of man-hours (sorry, person-hours) of work that entailed must have been massive.

Anyway, thank god the internet came along. Otherwise, HMG could have slimmed down to a policy core of about 50 people per Department (unlikely), or they'd have found things for people to do...

[fencingsculptor.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I first started work in Marsham Street in 1991 we didn't have PC's in the Office. We had big steel desks and metal bins and a humongous filing cabinets which could stick a small Child in. Colleagues smoked in the office and there was largely a tough-$hit attitude to the non-smokers. The decor was slightly more colourful than the office featured in Life on Mars but its pretty much what it was like - paper, foulders, files and piles and piles of more paper and a hazy smog of smoke. Carbon paper was ordered through stationary and correction fluid could still knock you out.

When the age of PCs did arrive the dot matrix printers were sooooooo loud they were placed in foam soundproofed boxes. It took about 5 days to draft a letter minute or submission as the damn thing was sent to Divisional Secretaries, typed retyped , commented on, subjected to divisional inquiry and finally being lost in the internal mail only to be rediscivered in a discarded grid a few months later. Photocopying had to be paid for by tokens (raffle tickets) which led to a black market in said tokens.

And I used to get a five minute snog in before work in the morning when i visted my girlfriends office.

Happy Days.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Cor.

I'd forgotten the photocopier tokens.

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

a five minute snog in before work in the morning

That's what's missing from government jobs these days. That and cider breaks.

[ladkyis.livejournal.com]

Hey! Hey you lot! I'm the little old lady here, none of you are old enough to do the "do you remember..." thing. You all need at least another ten years before you can start even the provisional phase. I have waited and waited to be old enough to do this and now you young whippersnappers are usurping my status! Enough! I say, or I will have to become a mean little old lady sooner than expected - I am in training.