Help me out here

[didds]

tea breaks, coffee breaks, smoke breaks - same as non office workers

didds

[didds]

sorry Snorvey - that needed a smiley or summat - my reply looks a bit direct and terse.

sorry!

didds

[UncleIan]

Chatting to/up the nice lass in another department.

2 hour lunch breaks down the pub.

Afternoon nap.

Read the paper sat on the bog.

Re-engineering paperclips.

Running the office fantasy football league.

Learning origami.

Moaning about poor management/stupid company procedures.

[Slarti]

What did office workers do to fanny around and while away the day instead of actually working before the advent of the internet / mobile phones?

Wander round with a clipboard looking for Mr X to sign this.

Or making lists of stuff.

Collecting things from the stationery store.


Slarti

[brightncheerful]

The only time I was an employee working in an office of a medium-sized company (approx 80 staff) was after I left school. The company's office hours were 9am to 5.30pm, at 1pm an hour for lunch. I thought sod that for a lark, worse than at school. Having got the hang of being adult, I'd arrive at work anytime between 0930 and 10:00 and leave by about 6pm. Others stopped for tea/coffee break mid-morning and mid-afternoon. I don't drink tea/coffee so i didn't stop work.

I wasn't the only one bothered by the long working day so soon after I was there the company changed its office hours to 9.30am to 5.30pm. I used to arrive anytime between 10:00 and 10.30 and leave by about 6pm. My promptness was noticed in the upper echelons. After a while the company offered to change my contract of employment to my preference: i was offered either 10am to 6pm or 10.30am to 6.30pm. I chose the former.

After that I got it down to a fine art. I'd arrive at about 10.30am to 11am having done a few errands for work on the way to the office. I'd leave for lunch at Noon so that by the time I got back at 1pm everyone else had gone to lunch which meant I could have 2 hours off. I'd leave before 6pm by which time everyone had left at 5.30pm so wouldn't notice I wasn't there.

Managed to stick out being an employee for just over 4 years and probably would've continued rising up the ranks to a more impressive pay-grade had it not been for getting claustrophobia on the London tube train which meant travelling to work became impossible. Having been self-employed for most of the subsequent years, I now work from about 8-8.30am to 7pm Monday to Friday, lunch break 20 minutes. During the day, for light relief I post on TLF and visit other favourite websites.

[brightncheerful]

Learning origami.

Very useful, given the number of businesses that fold and have folded.

[quelquod]

Collecting things from the stationery store.

+1. A more time-consuming activity than it’d seem as it includes persuading storekeepers that some parts of their job don’t involve either storing or keeping.

[zico]

Probably the day was previously spent trying to contact all the people who needed to know about something, get their views, then report back to all concerned, get their views, re-circulate it and then do a final draft for agreement.
Happily now this can all be done in a few minutes by email, leaving the rest of the day free to look at mobile phones and the internet.

[scotia]

"I'm looking for a job with a sky high pay, a four day week and a two hour day. Its maybe just because I'm inclined that way, but I never did like being idle."
Song, courtesy Matt McGinn

[gryffron]

persuading storekeepers that some parts of their job don’t involve either storing or keeping.

True story

Me: Hi, I need a new log book please.
Stationery Store bod disappears to back of stores, comes back holding a logbook.
Bod: It's the last one.
Me: That's ok. I only want one.
Bod: But I'm not sure if I should give it to you. Someone might want it.



Me: Someone does want it - Me!

[Slarti]

Being sent to the post office. Oh God what torture. And what an age it took

Being in the accounts function, there was also the daily run to the bank to do the paying in and the weekly run to the bank to collect the wages. Each gave the chance of a bit of time out of the office, but with the risk of being attacked for the money

Post office, to get the franking machine charged, which nearly gave you a hernia, and the annual trips for Road Fund Tax for the company vehicles, which took for ever.

Slarti

[AleisterCrowley]

Typing out change requests, putting them in orange resealable 'internal mail' envelopes, waiting weeks for a response...

[Gaggsy]

Sending 'humorous' faxes - usually a hand drawn cartoon which had been copied so many times it was barely legible.

Anyone got any examples of these?

[UncleIan]

Collecting things from the stationery store.

+1. A more time-consuming activity than it’d seem as it includes persuading storekeepers that some parts of their job don’t involve either storing or keeping.

Luckily, I started going out with the lass with the stationery cupboard keys. No, we we didn't do that in there, but my bosses were delighted with the number and variety of pens and notepads available to them.

Oh, that's what I used to spend time doing, getting purchase orders signed. Your boss needed something, it needed countersigning by his boss, someone in finance, someone in contracts, someone in HR. Luckily for me they were all in the same office. I ended up with a reputation for getting them signed quicker than anyone else ever managed. Smooth talking b'stard that I was. Or young and keen, so "getting signatures" didn't mean sloping off out the back to read the paper.

Also cutting and pasting used to take a lot longer, as it involved actual scissors and glue.

One place I worked had a grass tennis court, never used for tennis, they dropped the net every sunny day and had a fairly informal game of cricket on it, that always took longer than an hour. Not five days though right enough.

[UncleEbenezer]

Being sent to the post office. Oh God what torture. And what an age it took

Post Office.

Somewhere you go when you leave school, and reach the front of the queue just in time to collect your pension.

[Skotch]

Chatting to/up the nice lass in another department.

2 hour lunch breaks down the pub.

Afternoon nap.

Read the paper sat on the bog.

Re-engineering paperclips.

Running the office fantasy football league.

Learning origami.

Moaning about poor management/stupid company procedures.

You forgot to add:

Having a monthly competition to make the biggest ball out of rubber bands

[dionaeamuscipula]

Looking out of the window at nothing in particular. Probably more to do with school life, but still practiced extensively during pre internet work days.

For many years I worked in an office which was directly on the bank of the Thames. Apart from the everyday traffic on the river, there was:

*anything unusual going up or down from the Pool of London, from quite big visiting naval vessels downwards
*the sinking and eventual recovery of a barge
*filming part of a movie starring Meryl Streep
*the efforts to keep maintained a quite big ship we owned, famously only painted on the shore facing side

It was a wonder we ever got anything done at all.

DM

[swill453]

Usenet News, in many ways the precursor of all web-based forums like this. Though bulletin boards you accessed via a modem coexisted with them.

My first real job in IT was in 1984, and it wasn't long before I was whiling away the (paid) hours in the depths of uk.general, rec.arts.tv and the like.

"rn" was the newsreader of choice. It handled multi-threading and x-references far better than this and most other forum software around these days.

Days where you had fully caught up with all your groups, and the company modem had failed to connect to the local uni to download the latest batch, were the worst. So frustrating, you had to actually do some work.

Scott.

[Meatyfool]

rec.humor.oracle aka The Usenet Oracle.

Zadoz, Lisa, woodchucks, zots, more woodchucks.

Aah, those were the days.

Now to be found at https://internetoracle.org/

Meatyfool..

[kiloran]

Photocopying. Oh holy Jesus, photcopying. Reams of paper. Toners & paper jams right in the heart of the machine.

Paper jams were no problem in my early days in industry. If I wanted a photocopy, I could fill in a form, get my boss to sign it, clip the form to the relevant document, take it to the print room and get the copies back within 2 weeks.

If I need copies urgently, I filled in a red URGENT form, got my boss to sign it, and his boss to sign it. take it to the print room with the relevant document and join the queue. When I reached the head of the queue, I could get a maximum of 6 copies of the one document.

That was GEC, a FTSE100 (FTSE30?) company. No wonder they hurtled into oblivion.

--kiloran