What was it like going to work in the 60s, 70s and 80s?

[ERD50]

Not being questioned was a feature of working in those times. The culture was much more hierarchical.

Yes, my FIL was not a bitter man at all, but he related a story to me on several occasions - when he started working, he made some suggestions to the boss about how they might approach the job. The boss said "You're not paid to think, you're paid to work!".

And he always said it rather bitterly. It really made an impression on him.

-ERD50

 

[Walt34]

You were not allowed to leave the floor except at lunch (strictly 45 minutes in length, and only could be taken at the pre-authorized time). The only exception was payday, when you got 20 minutes that morning to go off site to the bank to deposit your check. I always looked forward to that escape.

The cheapness factor was really extreme. Every employee was allowed 2 pens, 2 pencils, and 2 pads of paper. If you ran out of one of these items, you would go to the person in charge of supplies and they would require in the case of a new pencil the old one back first, which would have to have less than 2 inches remaining on it. Pens would have to be non functional or out of ink, and if you wanted a new legal pad of paper you had to return that cardboard backing in order to get a fresh pad.

If you lost or misplaced any of these office supplies you were out of luck!

Wow. I would have developed a severe attitude problem, eventually I'd tell the idiots what I thought, and been fired.

 

[JoeWras]

Wow. I would have developed a severe attitude problem, eventually I'd tell the idiots what I thought, and been fired.

Something comes to mind, as I watch Walt flying upside down. Airplanes. Never question the Captain.

Well, that was then. But things have changed. I remember reading about Unitied Flight 173. The black box recordings are chilling as the flight engineer professionally reads out fuel readings that are getting ridiculously low. Perhaps they were all too preoccupied. Or perhaps, the engineer was just doing his job, reading out the fuel to the Captain as was his duty. Hell if the plane crashes or not, he was doing his job without questioning the Captain!

 

[timo2]

Wow. I would have developed a severe attitude problem, eventually I'd tell the idiots what I thought, and been fired.

Now you know where unions came from. Good employers don't have to worry about unions.

I also worked at a place that a whistle went off for the morning and afternoon breaks, and also for lunch. 9,12 & 3. almost like Dr. Pepper! After that died away in the early 1980's, we still had a manager who would lurk at the door at 1:00 looking for people that were late coming back from lunch. At each quarterly work review, the manager would have a chart showing what days you took sick and vacation leave, and how many hours. If there was any kind of a pattern to the sick leave, they wrote you up for that.

And right before I started, in 1984, they had finally started letting women wear pants, and men not having to wear ties.

 

[marko]

Wow. I would have developed a severe attitude problem, eventually I'd tell the idiots what I thought, and been fired.

Oh, but you'd be missing all the fun! That sort of corp BS and 'by the book' stuff is the foundation of some really good, entertaining, passive-aggressive behavior.

The idea is to say nothing, do what you're told and watch the policies blow up in their faces!

"....sorry boss that I didn't leave you that very important message but Miss X in the mail room wouldn't give me any more message pads; and policy is that all messages must be on those pink message pads..."

"...Yes, it went motor freight instead of airfreight, but the airfreight guys had already left and you were screaming that it had to go out today--no matter what-- so it went out today..."

"...yes, I know it's now an emergency situation but last week you said that I had to take my vacation starting tomorrow--no exceptions-- or lose it, so...."

"...I know there weren't enough handouts for the executive board meeting, but the mail room said we'd already maxed out our allotment of copies for the week; in fact the last handout is missing 12 pages...."

"...You said that Mrs X is the only one allowed to have the keys to the files; and now she's in Hawaii for two weeks..."

 

[Nodak]

I started working for the Air Force in 1983; about a year later we received a message asking how many PCs we wanted for our operation. I lobbied for at least 3 but was over ruled and the site Commander said he didn't think we needed any. We received a return message that said we would take at least 1. They were Zenith Z100s if I remember correctly and came with enough documentation to fill about 10 feet of bookshelf. Including, for reasons I will never understand, an Assembler level listing of the boot ROM. The thing came with a Diablo daisy wheel printer that weighed about 60 pounds. Within about two years there were PCs everywhere.

 

[Meadbh]

I remember, as a medical intern in 1980, working for an OCD endocrinologist. He was very demanding, impatient and unreasonable. We had a patient in the hospital for investigation of a rare endocrine disorder. The tests included six days worth of urine collection, and if the patient forgot to pee into the appropriate container, the whole day's collection would be ruined. On the fifth day, the attending physician demanded to know the results of the urine tests. When I replied that the collection was not yet complete, he went on a rant, implying that I, as the intern, hadn't been doing my job. Never mind that we still had one day's worth of urine to collect before the lab could do the analysis! The patient and I were both pissed off!

I had to put up with a lot of unreasonable demands as a resident. The longest shift I ever worked without more than one hour's uninterrupted sleep was from Saturday morning at 0900h to Monday evening at 1700h (56 hours). I truly thought I was going to die. I shudder to think what my decision making was like at the end. Somehow I managed to drive home safely and crashed into bed. The next morning I had to go back and start a 32 hour shift. Those hours have improved somewhat in the US and Canada, but interns and residents are still being abused in Ireland, where I did my residency.

 

[travelover]

Oh, but you'd be missing all the fun! That sort of corp BS and 'by the book' stuff is the foundation of some really good, entertaining, passive-aggressive behavior.

The idea is to say nothing, do what you're told and watch the policies blow up in their faces! ...............

We used to call it malicious obedience.

 

[Walt34]

The idea is to say nothing, do what you're told and watch the policies blow up in their faces!

Well, there is that, and thinking about it a little more I've done my share of malicious obedience too!

 

[Live Free]

And right before I started, in 1984, they had finally started letting women wear pants, and men not having to wear ties.

I didn't realize that the women and pants thing went into the 70s and early 80s. My mom was talking about how she couldn't wear pants to work in the 50s and 60s and I was literally floored. I cannot remember ever wearing a dress or business skirt to work. Gah!

 

[braumeister]

We used to call it malicious obedience.

Unions call it "working to rule".

 

[athena53]

I didn't realize that the women and pants thing went into the 70s and early 80s. My mom was talking about how she couldn't wear pants to work in the 50s and 60s and I was literally floored. I cannot remember ever wearing a dress or business skirt to work. Gah!

Yep- I plead guilty for Dear Old Dad on this one. He was brought in as District Manager for a steel company and told his Admin she was to wear skirts. Pants were not professional for women in the office.

Near the end of my career I developed a dislike for panty hose and wore almost nothing but pants. I even have an immaculately-tailored pinstripe suit.

 

[Sarah in SC]

Oh thank god that dress code went away. I haven't worn pantyhose to work a day in my life!!!!

 

[Gumby]

I didn't realize that the women and pants thing went into the 70s and early 80s. My mom was talking about how she couldn't wear pants to work in the 50s and 60s and I was literally floored. I cannot remember ever wearing a dress or business skirt to work. Gah!

Some places it went even longer. When I started in my first big law firm in 1992, women were not allowed to wear pants. After a couple years, the women all got together and wore pants to work on the same day, silently challenging the old guys to say anything about it. That was the end of the no pants rule. Men had to wear a suit and tie every day, white shirt only, and if you left your personal office, you had to put your suit jacket on.

 

[martyp]

I started work as a research technician at a National laboratory in 1980. I had a big wooden desk. A chair that was hardly ergonomic. A touch tone telephone. An ADM terminal. The technology environment was pretty modern but it was all just so slow. Fax machines were slow. I would write documents on the unix vi editor but the printer was in the next building and my docs just went into the queue. Programming was difficult because there was so little memory to work with. Digital storage was cassette tapes for our laboratory instruments. In general, though I don't think my sense of the technology environment was much different than today.

As for professions in demand . . . really . . . anyone who graduated from college in the sciences or engineering could get a job. IT and computer science was big but so was everything else. Not that many people went to college in those days. It's not that things were all that different back then for college grads. It that today things are different (in a bad way) for those with a high school degree or a minimal post HS education.

 

[NW-Bound]

I started my professional career at an aerospace company in the late 70s. I smoked cigarettes at my desk, and a couple of older engineers had their pipe. There was a cigarette vending machine out in the hall.

In the late 80s, when I was at another larger aerospace company, cigarette smoking started to be banned indoors. It was OK to go out to an open space like the patio or courtyard to smoke. A few years ago, I heard that they even banned smoking anywhere on the company property, and that included the parking lot.

About dress code, we usually wore a suit when on company trips. When seeing visitors coming in for a meeting, we did not wear a suit, but put on a tie and a dress shirt. It was still the same when I left for my own small venture business in 1996.

When I came back to the megacorp world for part-time work as a job shopper in 2003, I was startled to see a much more casual environment. Nobody wore a suit, even when visiting a client or a subcontractor, and that included high levels up to director. It was most likely that an executive VP still wore suit when on business trips, but I was only involved with technical people.

 

[HFWR]

Whenever someone came to w*rk wearing a tie/suit, we always joked that they must have an interview...

 

[scrabbler1]

I also worked at a place that a whistle went off for the morning and afternoon breaks, and also for lunch. 9,12 & 3. almost like Dr. Pepper! After that died away in the early 1980's, we still had a manager who would lurk at the door at 1:00 looking for people that were late coming back from lunch.

This reminds me of a story my mom told me back in the mid-1980s when she was still working. She designed circuit boards at a small plant which had the production floor in the back and the designers and office workers in the front. The plant had 2 entrances, one in the back for the production line workers and one in the front for visitors and clients.

The only problem was that the white-collar workers like her were never allowed to use the front entrance when entering and exiting the building. She and her coworkers were always dressed well, so there wasn't an issue with clients seeing a bunch of factory workers in jeans coming in and out through the waiting room (they were hourly workers so they had punch a time clock at the rear door). However, they were watched by the lurking office manager like you described, and it took an extra 10 minutes round-trip to walk all the way to the rear door then walk around the building outside to the street to go to lunch which was only 30 minutes. That cuts down a lot of the limited lunch time.

I recall she complained management about this practice and asked that the white-collar people be allowed to use the front door to enter and exit and got rebuffed. She soon got another job but I am not sure how much this nitpicky attitude had to do with it - she might have received a better salary; I know the new job was only a 5-minute drive from her house.

She lasted only a few years at her new place before she, sadly, got Cancer in 1991 and went out on disability before she died a few years later.

 

[M Paquette]

Whenever someone came to w*rk wearing a tie/suit, we always joked that they must have an interview...

Heh, heh...

I used that to good effect a few times. Starting a few months before annual reviews, just show up at work in a suit, or dress slacks and shirt (looking tie and jacket ready). Take a long lunch. When asked about the attire, deflect the conversation.

Make managers nervous. Starts rumors. Profit!

 

[marko]

Whenever someone came to w*rk wearing a tie/suit, we always joked that they must have an interview...

And then there were the guys who worked on the factory floor and would come in with suit and tie, go in the locker room and change into work clothes and then repeat the process going home.

Some of them were just old-school --and that's how it was done in the old country--but most of them wanted their neighbors to think they were executives! Really.

 

[NW-Bound]

Talk about smoking at work, we have come a long way in 30 years. I was still smoking when I was head of a small local office of one of the startups. I instituted the same rule of no indoors smoking that I picked up from the megacorp that I left. I do not remember when I stopped smoking inside my home, but it had to be around the same time of about 20 years ago.

I still remember when smoking was allowable in the back of aircraft. It was so bad back there that I would seat in non-smoking even though I was a smoker. Inside airports, there were smoking rooms, then eventually entire airports became smoke-free. Imagine how non-smokers suffered all those years. Or perhaps everybody got so used to second-hand smoke that it did not bother them as much as it does now.

 

[braumeister]

Imagine how non-smokers suffered all those years.

Amen!
I was a heavy smoker when young, and after I quit, (decades ago), I was absolutely mystified at how my nonsmoking friends had been able to put up with me. I asked them, and they just said "It was so common that we had no choice but to deal with it." Good people.

 

[ERD50]

... Imagine how non-smokers suffered all those years. Or perhaps everybody got so used to second-hand smoke that it did not bother them as much as it does now.

No, many of us never 'got used to it'. I have always hated smoke. Especially at a meal. It's disgusting, and I'm still angry that so many meals I've paid for were ruined because I had to accept the smoke wafting in my face. Or go out to a club, and have you clothes and hair soaked with the stench of stale smoke. Yuk. I want to just climb into bed, but my clothes/hair stink so much I need to take a shower, and hang my clothes in the garage. It always struck me just what nerve they had to affect everyone around them with their stinkin' habit.

To this day, when occasionally leaving a restaurant, or a club, I smile thinking about how nice it was to enjoy the meal, drinks and/or entertainment w/o having to shut up and accept the stench of someone else's obnoxious cigarette smoke.

Hmmmm, that has me thinking of the modern day equivalent, that I might take to the rant thread... but some people will not like it

-ERD50

 

[athena53]

I still remember when smoking was allowable in the back of aircraft. It was so bad back there that I would seat in non-smoking even though I was a smoker.

Ever been in the smoking car of a commuter train? Awful! I ran into a few coworkers at Hoboken station, both smokers, so suggested we sit in the smoking car. I was practically gasping and wheezing when I got to my station. I never did that again. They had a bar car on some of the trains in and out of NYC but I never encountered one.

 

[CaliforniaMan]

In those old days when we used to receive documents by mail, as a nonsmoker I could always tell when it was sent by a smoker.