The Life of an Office DataLounger circa 1979!

1979 is the exact year Ginny from Billing was in my life. She was always nagging about time sheets. I broke her heart by lying on a meal reimbursement sheet.

Who ever thought I'd use a Wang for a word processor?

Ah, punch cars, now those were the days.

punch cards*

We didn't have a computer in the advertising agency where I worked in '79.

IBM Selectrics™? Yes. Computers, no.

Yeah actually for quite a while after the first IBM PCs they remained the exception rather than the rule.

Before going to law school I worked in the PR industry for a few years, starting in 1985, and we didn’t have a desktop computer. No internet, no email. We just had a phone and a Rolodex.

There were PCs but they were used mostly for spreadsheets back then, and word processing.

Back when music connected people and not modems and routers ...

I am a computer nurd. In 1979 I was working for Warner Bros using a monster computer IBM 360 to pay royalties to singers.

We added a megabyte of memory to the computer in 1975 for $1 million.

In 1979, my after school job was as a keypunch operator.

I wonder what happened to all those machines?

Money well spent R8, thank you very much.

R10 in 1979 Madge was just a street whore.

As opposed to now, r11?

Hey Ciccone, how much to put this twig in your cunt?

First of all, the clothes were fabulous!

Anybody remember this day? I was temping in a Manhattan Law FIrm, everyone fucking freaking out......

Stock Market Crash of 1987

October 1987

The first contemporary global financial crisis unfolded on October 19, 1987, a day known as “Black Monday,” when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22.6 percent.

They should separate the men from the women.

There were rumors of an amazing machine called a fax.

We had one at my company and communicated with barges on the Mississippi River towing coal. Then sent their manifests.

Except back then we called it a "telefacsimile" and it took forever to do one page. And. you had to use special paper for it.

If you wanted to change the font of your letter, you changed the ball on your IBM Selectric II.

^ fancy schmancy

The Gestetner got ink all over my JC Penney pantsuit!

There was so much sexual activity going on in the basement File Room that they had to post a hall monitor down there.

^ But he likes blow jobs as much as the rest of them fairies - so cover you eyes if you have to go looking for a file...

Had to wear a shirt and tie every day. In the early 80s we had ‘casual Fridays’ and were allowed to wear jeans. If you showed up in jeans any other day you were sent home. I saw it happen. I miss those days. Simpler times and I think we were a lot happier.

That vest was very stylish and appropriate for the fondue/key party later that evening.

I used a telex machine to communicate with the main office in France.

"Hey Gertie, if I give you seventy five cents could you run down to the vending machine in the lobby and get me another pack of Barclays? This is my last one and I can't get out from behind this typewriter until I finish typing out all these invoices. The messenger will be here in less than an hour. Thanks, doll!"

Three martini lunch!

R25

In the 1970s, the "key party" became a popular phenomenon among swinging couples, where attendees would pick keys out of a bowl and go home with whoever's keys they picked. These types of sex swap parties still happen today, and are apparently very popular in the Silicon Valley.

Key party lore is exclusively heterosexual, women are not afforded sexual veto power, and men are guaranteed a partner with no chance of rejection

bump

R3 punch cards are one of the reasons my mother never went back to work after having me. Her big office skill was punch cards and by the time I got old enough for school nobody needed/wanted punch card experts any more.

[quote]Who ever thought I'd use a Wang for a word processor?

We had Wang computers at a law firm where I clerked in the early '80s.

We had to evacuate the office once that summer because of an impending hurricane. The lead secretary reminded each of us: "Make sure you power off your Wang."

Of course, since we were 12 inside, we chortled.

R32 sorry not office related but that reminded me about when I really was 12 and my church gave all the older kids NIV teen Bibles. At one point when discussing sex, it compared sex to a ham sandwich, so anytime anyone of us would hear the words ham sandwich we would laugh and people thought we were crazy. Like if someone’s mom asked if we wanted a ham sandwich for lunch.

[quote]it compared sex to a ham sandwich

It suggested mayo instead of mustard, no doubt.

[quote]R19 If you wanted to change the font of your letter, you changed the ball on your IBM Selectric II.

Wasn’t this Ginny from Billing’s favorite font? All her inter office memos looked like this (but on pink paper)

Ted said we're getting rid of all the typewriters!

1984 isn't too far away, girls- Big Brother is watching!

Everywhere I worked in the late 70s early 80s it was IBM PCs, not Apple. I still remember that grinding noise the unit would make as it read the 8 inch floppy disks. Letter quality printers were so enormous they had to be on a separate table and used flywheels same as a typewriter. They were so noisy they would have huge clear plastic/plexiglass covers to cut down on the noise. The rigid, top-down IT Department control of today was non-existent. I remember a temp job at Pacific Bell where every manager was just ordering and installing whatever word processing program they liked, no consistency and not always compatible with each other even within the same department. You had to know a lot of different word processing programs.

[quote] I still remember that grinding noise the unit would make as it read the 8 inch floppy disks. Letter quality printers were so enormous they had to be on a separate table and used flywheels same as a typewriter.

Reading this brought back a lot of memories!

Do you feel like you engaged more with your coworkers Bc people weren’t all distracted on their phones? Like did people have to actually talk to each other more?

To an extent R40. Used to go out for long lunches a lot more in the pre-Internet days. But also there was a lot more time spent on the phone, which I hated.

“Have you seen Kramer vs Kramer yet? Dustin Hoffman was sooo sexy, I’d marry him and raise his child for him!”

My office had a cable address. Still useful in the 70's and early 80's for reaching the States from then-telephonically challenged places. Otherwise you just shouted at the phone, hoping they heard you in Pakistan or Brasil.

We had Selectric typewriters with a selection of typeballs that IBM called "elements." And a small, somewhat reliable Xerox copier, because everything was on paper. Everything.

Parking was $2.00 a day. Good seats for Liza Minnelli were $12. Clubs kept playing the extended version of Donna Summers' "MacArthur Park" when you went out.

We'd just started talking about Patti Lupone as Evita.

The metal-cased blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2, the world's first low-cost personal stereo, went on sale in Japan on July 1, 1979, and was sold for around ¥33,000 (or $150.00).[9] Though Sony predicted it would sell about 5,000 units a month, it sold more than 30,000 in the first two months.

Working in law offices, I still remember the first time I saw letterhead with an email address in it. That was NEW!

I love this thread. Keep going!

If you wanted a diet soda out of the drink machine, you drank Tab.

Diet Coke wasn't introduced until 1982.

Back then, every office had a lush, but she was the object of ridicule and friendship, rather than bustled off to an inpatient treatment program.

Bosses could grope and leer and be utter perverts with their subordinates, and face no real consequence.

You could smoke at your desk, and everyone did.

The work day started at 9am, not 8am.

And ended, R48, promptly at 5.

And yup, I remember Franny, the aging alkie who had a screwdriver or two for breakfast before she got to the office, a couple more to get her through the morning, and then drank her lunch at the bar next door. Thank god she took the train home. Driving would have been fatal sooner or later.

Poor Franny sounded like the kind of alcoholic who actually needed to drink during the day to prevent going into withdrawal.

R49 Atta Girl!

In the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was doing layouts at in-house art departments and ad agencies, the old school way: T-square, triangles, rubylith overlays, Rapidiograph pens, stats of photos/art and the copy for the ads and editorials came from a print house! The components were then lated-out using rubber cement, the waxers came later.

In the places I worked, Macs were introduced for graphic design in the early 1990s.

Mandatory retirement age was 65. Bye Evelyn.

There was always some divorcée on staff named Lois, looking forward her next mark.

R50, R 51 Yeah, she was kinda useless by 2 in the afternoon.

I wasn’t there long enough to know for sure, but I think she’d fucked the owner’s father back in the day and the job was her reward. His son, the then-owner and later a famous criminal and asshole, had much younger and better-looking girlfriends. One of them was a cokehead before it was fashionable, but I never saw her stagger to the ladies room.

I worked in an art department where one of the cokeheads was actually snorting coke in the projector machine which the illustrators used to trace and enlarge the artwork to the specific sizes needed for the layouts.

In order to keep the office light out as they traced, the illustrators head and shoulders had to be covered with a large piece of black material, it was quite easy to hide doing coke when using that machine.

I knew the cokehead was snorting coke in the machine because she had no reason to use it, she wasn't an illustrator. The actual illustrators were always complaining about all the 'white powder' on the glass!

R47 in 1979 you could drink Diet Pepsi.

"You could smoke at your desk, and everyone did."

Not every office allowed it. My employer strictly regulated smoking, and did not allow it at your desk, ever. Smoking was limited to the employee cafeteria and employee lounges. It wasn't even allowed in hallways or bathrooms.

About smoking, I've always wondered did people actually walk around malls and stores smoking, inside? Except for when we visited North Carolina, I never saw people smoking inside unless they were sitting in the smoking section. I got so used to saying non-smoking when we went out to eat I still sometimes say it, the young person at the podium always gives me a strange look. Because who smokes indoors anymore?

Smoking was allowed in the corridors of malls. Benches had those big round ashtrays next to them. You couldn't smoke in the stores (as far as I can remember) but smoking was all over the corridors with people puffing away. In the Northeast, smoking in malls was banned around the mid-90s but in other regions of the country it was allowed for several more years.

It's crazy to think about this today. Imagine someone today sitting on a bench in a mall and puffing away on a cig.

[quote]"You could smoke at your desk, and everyone did."

When someone complained about the woman sitting near them smoking, our office's solution was to get the smoker a "smoke-eating ashtray" which smelled worse than smoke and didn't even work.

The attitude was "We know Lori doesn't like smoke, but we can't tell Linda she can't smoke at HER OWN DESK."

In the office I worked at in 1979 there was a switchboard operator.

And there was no such thing as voice mail.

R62 Did your desk also have an in/out basket? I always wondered how one was supposed to separate incoming items from outgoing ones.

In a big office (such as mine) mail was delivered around the offices on carts, not put into cubbyholes.

Interoffice mail was sent in sturdy letter- or legal-sized envelopes, the kind that were closed by winding a red string around a bobbin thing on the back. You were supposed to reuse these, so they'd have whole lists of crossed-out names on the front before it got to yours.

Imagine paying one or more fools just to wander around the office pushing a mail cart half the day. Hell, imagine getting so much paper mail that you had to hire people just to manage it as a core business function!

My modern workplace has one part-time mail clerk (a vulgar old crone), and a receptionist (sassy gay boy who dresses like a Froot Loop and can't be trusted with a bottled water) to handle all of those clerical tasks. I say we replace both of them with a touchscreen and a wicker basket inside the lobby doors. The only mail we get nowadays is chicken-scratch from senile seniors who think we're the gas company.

[quote] Back then, every office had a lush, but she was the object of ridicule and friendship, rather than bustled off to an inpatient treatment program.

The one in my office was a bottle blonde in her late 50s, as thin as the Parliament 100s she chained smoke and was a fixture at the fern bar off the lobby.

We had a phonebook, updated annually.

New hires were penciled in until the next one came out.

There were no modesty panels between urinals. That was great.

r65 a visual

10" x 13" Brown Kraft Button-and-String Inter-Departmental Envelopes

have Ginny order more!

^^ my friend and I on different floors used to send notes back and forth in those every day, like kids in class : )

bump

There were three of us who controlled all the online information from the outside world.

- An executive assistant in Public Relations who had access to PR Newswire

- A paralegal in Corporate Law & Regulation who had access to LEXIS (then NEXIS).

- And then there was me, the Corporate Librarian in Planning & Engineering who had access to DIALOG.

We ran the place.

My boss got a new car...

Pussy-bow blouses!

As we got into the 1980s, they switched from white, brown, beige, and patterns to jewel tones.

R54 Lois should become a DL icon.

I was taking punch tapes that had been pulled from a mechanical cash register and feeding them into a mainframe so the store chain would know how many polyester knit skirt sets were sold last week

I'm Most Likely To 'Go Postal'

R65, ha, my workplace still uses those envelopes, complete with the crossed-out names.

1979 memories after working hours!

Perhaps the most interesting experience I had with someone I met was with Joey, owner of a car dealership in Westchester County, who took me out on his boat in the town of Harrison on Long Island Sound. He picked me up on a Saturday morning in August 1979, and there were two children in the backseat of his car! It turns out he was married, and while he and I went out on the boat to "relax", his wife and kids were back at the boathouse.

Dennis was a Catholic priest from Douglaston, Queens, who I met through a personal ad in the Village Voice. Although I didn't meet him at the baths, I introduced him to the Club Baths on a Friday when it was "Buddy Night", and two gained admission for the price of one. Another fellow, Tom, a librarian from Scranton, PA, invited me to visit him, but with the caveat that since he lived with his father we'd have to have sex in his car in the garage. We spoke on the phone a few times but I didn't take him up on his invitation.

Bill was a guard at the US Embassy in Iran on Tehran's Teleghani Ave. I met him in the summer of 1979, just a few months before embassy personnel were taken hostage. Then there was Bruce (at first he told me his name was Rick), who was a chef at a restaurant on Cape Cod during the summer in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard. On one date he came to my apartment and made Coq au vin, and showed me how to prepare asparagus. Phillip, who lived in Inwood in northern Manhattan, was the first black guy I was ever with.

Mel was a former copywriter at McCann Erickson and lived on Staten Island. I've only been to that borough a few times in my life, and the first time was to visit him. He took me to see the Broadway musical Whoopie and we also saw the Woody Allen film Manhattan. His was the first uncut cock I ever "encountered." One more thing - he was in his early 50s, my father's age.

Bill, originally from Milwaukee, was a temp at Touche Ross (before it became Deloitte Touche), and lived at an SRO on West 12th St. off 6th Ave. called the Ardsley House. He took me to the Russian Tea Room for dinner. He was smitten with me, but I wasn't ready for a serious relationship. His was the first of many hearts I've broken.

Don lived in Bethpage on Long Island and I visited him there on Memorial Day weekend 1979. Upon coming back on Sunday I went directly to the baths and ended up meeting Joe from Bensonhurst Brooklyn. On one of our dates we saw Alien in Times Square and while we were in the theater his car was towed. He had a share out in the Pines but he wouldn't take me because he didn't think I was ready.

Tab? Diet Pepsi?? Fresca all the way, dude!

1979: My first full year working in DC (after having moved there from CA in late '78.) I don't remember having computers in my government office (although there was some sort of way to have other people generate computer-printed reports) but we DID have this fabulous device: The LEKTRIEVER!

Smoking at your desk

I was a 2-pack-a-day smoker and smoked at my desk and at whatever restaurant we took clients to for lunch. I haven't smoked in over 30 years but I often wonder how many people might have suffered from second-hand smoke from working in the same office. It was unheard of to ask someone to put out a cigarette, especially a boss.

I had a college job that involved typing out requisition or purchase orders in triplicate (or maybe even quadruplicate). It was different-colored "NCR" paper that was a technological improvement from inserting carbon paper between your copies.

If you made a mistake, you'd have to correct it on each copy. The office also had different-colored Liquid Paper for that task.

I was a horrible typist. Slow and lots of errors.

Yes, I was probably smoking cigarettes and drinking sodas. I don't even think I had my own desk. It was me and 3 other students just typing out these purchase orders.

When I worked for Blue Cross/Blue Shield they had a file clerk who filed alphabetically, if not always accurately: all the nuns were under "S" for "Sister."

Here's some office broads sipping down sodium, followed by ME guzzling something hot and salty with a smile. I won an Oscar just a few years later!

In 1979 I worked for a bank after graduation from college. At that time there was little automation, but we had a huge computer that batch processed our financial data and ran our TSO (Time Sharing Option) terminals in our branches and head office departments. To run a new program, we had to submit JCL (job control language) punch cards to the computer input department and they would run the jobs, then call or send an interoffice message using a reusable envelope when the jobs completed. We didn't get email until the mid 80s and PCs shortly after.

Also in 1979, checks were manually encoded with the check amount, then sorted by bank. The checks passed through a machine (IBM 3890) that sorted, microfilmed and endorsed each check. The machine read the MICR encoding at the bottom of the check. A picture of this monster machine is pictured in the link below. Operating this machine was my part time job while I attended college.

In the early 80s I worked an office job in a hospital, and photocopying was done only in the "Copy Center." You'd take whatever you needed copied down there, attach a form to specify how many copies you wanted, single-sided or two-sided, paper color, etc and drop it into a basket. Later in the day, you’d go back down to see if your copies were ready. They always had one of these signs on display.

R89 That is amazingly specific, and seems perfectly described.

R89 I worked in a hospital in 1979. One time a nurse asked me to grab some towels in the linen room, a large closet off the main corridor of a patient floor, because she was busy with a patient.

I opened the linen room door to see the naked butt of one of the residents pumping away with his pants around his ankles and the legs of one of the nurses in the air, her skirt almost over her head and shouting, "Give it to me! Give it to me!" I grabbed the closest pile of towels on a shelf and got out of there, speechless: not even composed enough to say "Pardon me." We all knew each other and it was never, ever mentioned again; oddly, given that we saw each other (fully clothed) every day.

BTW, I've never opened a closed door since then without knocking first.

Op nobody wore clothing like that in 1979. Maybe 1970 but not by ‘79. You would have been laughed out of the office.

R91 Was it at least a nice ass?

[R89] I had that job more than once! A) high school summer work; and B) college ‘work study’ financial aid.😵‍💫

^in the copy room, we would sit around and b.s. the day away…copy projects were done at the “last minute” or you could wait ‘til later.

R95 Some days, we don't let the line move at all. We call those "Weekdays."

In the days before voice mails and e-mails, these pink "While You Were Out" notepads were used. This pad (in the link) must be modern because it has an option for "mobile" and "fax." But this is what that notepad looked like.

R80, WTF does your 'after hours' sex life have to do with gay office life in 1979? 🥱 😴

Go start another thread on that topic.

So much married straight cock!

Talk about smoking in the office? New computers were wheeled into the general office with ‘no eating’ signs hastily posted. Yet office smoker and general good time girl got to puff away and drop ash over the keyboards. I heard all about the unfairness of it all because I was the department’s ‘good listener’.

R100 One of our admins in the 80s was telling me once at a previous job she spilled coffee in the keyboard of one of those early word processors (AES maybe?). From that day on she stopped putting cream or sugar in her coffee at work, because that's what really messes up keyboards. Nowadays you can get a cheap keyboard for less than the cost of a Starbucks Venti.

Jessica trades in her typewriter for a computer!! Her expression when she learns her hard drive has crashed!