Great thread, everyone!
I began working in an office in 1985, so I saw the beginning of what would be a large transformation in how offices operated. I worked in the actuarial field, a field which in 1988 was ranked as #1 overall in some jobs rated almanac even though it did not finish #1 in any of the individual categories.
When I began, there were very few individual cubicles and offices, only for the management (or used for storage). Desks often faced those of coworkers with only bookcases and cabinets acting as partial partitions between our desks. We underlings had shared phone lines while the management had their own phone lines. To make long distance calls, we had this Wats system where you would enter some codes and hang up and wait a minute or so for the system to call you back. When you answered, the system would call the number you chose. Whoever was making a Wats call would always announce, "Wats call!" when it called you back so your phone-mate or someone else would not answer it. Pretty crude. No voice mail. No call-pickup, either, although that was coming soon.
My area ordered and reviewed insurance reports from our Data Services (DS) area. I was luck to have just missed the days when we would fill out these "control cards" which were really a few (or, sometimes, many more) sheets of paper with codes representing what we wanted in the reports. This had become more "modern" so we entered these control cards electronically on our mainframe system which were then captured by the DS folks. The reports we received were on continuous-feed paper and on copies of microfiche which was often tough to read on a microfiche viewer. We had 2 or 3 of those in my small work sub-unit of 5 people within our 15-person division. We still had to send a memo to DS to order the reports although I would soon devise a way to speed up that slow process.
We had routing slips and a separate Word Processing in/out boxes for most memos or other documents. We had several of those mainframe terminals scattered around the floor with the green, eye-straining display on black background. There were a few PCs (far fewer than the mainframe ones) scattered around the division, some connected to printers, some not. The diskettes were those old ~5" floppy ones but the smaller ~3" ones were just coming into play around that time. It was cumbersome to write our own memos but we did them anyway.
The printers were all dot-matrix including our mainframe one but soon we got more laserjets for PC and mainframe use. One guy, our division's official computer wiz, had a PC which could handle both PC and mainframe so if we needed to download or upload between the two, we went to his work area, separate from his desk.
In 1986, they did some reconstruction on my floor to create primitive cubicles to mostly separate us from our coworkers. It also separated the small work unit from each other. But the aisles were narrow so we felt like rats in a maze. If we had visitors from another floor or from outside the company visiting us, they often could not find us even we told them how to find us beforehand. I had some shorter file cabinets and bookshelves surrounding my desk so I was a little easier to find.
Smoking was permitted but thankfully nobody in my small work unit smoked. A few others in my division and in the other 2 divisions on our floor did but I didn't have the foul air drifting near me.
I used a large binder clip attached to a bookcase to hang up my coat.Among our office supplies were white-out fluid and 3 sizes of white tape for the many cut-and-paste jobs we often had to do.
In 1988, I devise a way to more efficiently order reports from DS.In a mainframe file, we would put our requests into a file that would automatically be printed at 4 AM in the DS area, a building 50 miles away after they moved there in 1986.That printout was delivered to the DS people.This worked well because they got to work earlier than we did so they often ran the reports and had them in our interoffice mail by the time we got there around 9 AM.This was our primitive, limited version of email although nobody had invented the word in the late 1980s.
I switched to another division in 1989 which had a similar layout from my old one except it wasn’t like a rat’s maze.A larger division, more people had their own cubicles while we underlings shared large cubicles of 4 people. I would later get my own cubicle for a few months before the company soon relocated to another location in lower Manhattan.More laser printers were arriving but we did not have our own terminals, mainframe or PC, until that last cubicle I had for a few months.It wasn’t connected to a printer, though.In this division, there were separate bullpen areas with 3 to 8 terminals, some mainframe, some PC.We also had an early version of office email on the mainframe but it was available only to management for the first few years.
We had a few more smokers on this floor but I wasn’t sitting near them until I had my own cubicle.There were some small fans to blow the smoke away from me.The phones were getting a little more advanced, as call pick-up was added to our system.Still no voice mail.
Then in 1991 we moved to another building in lower Manhattan.It was much better than what we left behind.First, no smoking.The phones didn’t have voice mail right away but that soon was added.No caller-ID, though.We did have 3-way calling and call-forwarding/transferring.We didn’t have mainframe terminals or PCs on our desks but some of us (including me) did with in a year.Each cubicle had some file drawers and overhead bins which was a huge improvement.All printers were laserjets and they were soon linked to our PCs, once everyone had one, using systemizers, an early version of a LAN.
Once everyone had a PC which also had mainframe, we soon had a PC-based email system (Microsoft Exchange a n early version of Outlook).Another big change was the end of producing the bulk of our reports on paper and microfiche.That was now sent electronically and read on screen.By 1993, we had our first Windows-based PCs instead of the old DOS ones.Along with that, we used Word and Excel for the first time, replacing Displaywrite and Lotus although I kept using Lotus a lot for the rest of the 1990s.
Casual Fridays began one summer in the mid-1990s.It gradually expanded to Casual Fridays all year round, then Casual Summer then by 1998 the whole formal dress code (shirt, tie, nice shoes for us men) was abolished.
My company’s benefits package became more generous in the 1990s although the standard work week expanded from 35 to 37.5 hours.In the early 1990s, the company match on the 401k increased from 50% to 75%.In 1997, we went from not-for-profit to for-profit and the ESOP was born, the same ESOP I was able to retire on.So for a few years (my peak earnings years), I had a pension, a 401k with a nice match, and a fast-growing ESOP.
Yes, the good old days.
