What you do today vs. what I had to deal with back in 1989….

Mildly infuriating in 1989:

1. Co-workers start typing on the office typewriter just as I was about to make a person-to-person long distance phone call.
2. Getting my new job business cards right the first time in a new job. It rarely was correct the first time and I would be stuck with a card that had my first name as “Gichard” instead of “Richard.”
3. Wearing a formal three piece suit to my first interview for a career job that paid $19,000 a year. It was in a conference room. On a Saturday morning. There were 14 people around the table including the CEO, CFO, Head of HR, her deputy, his secretary, one person from every other department. And one person, who did not identify as my future boss. He did not get to ask me any questions. The interview lasted from 10AM to 4:30PM. I got to pee once around 1:30PM when we took a “10 minute break.” There was a single all gender restroom just outside the conference room. For 15 people. Guess who was last back into the conference room and got a dirty look from the CEO? You have guessed correctly. The job I interviewed for was the lowest entry level position in this government agency. I was one of 20'ish candidates, and they hired only three. They made it a point to tell me I was their 3rd choice in the offer letter. My probation lasted 18 months. Job was in Texas in a large city. Edit: I forgot the best part of the interview: At the end of the interview, the CEO announced “By a show of hands, who votes yea? There were 10 yea votes. His hand was not raised. Simple majority meant I was eligible to be offered the job. Not that I had the job.
4. I found the job announcement in the Want Ads of a regional newspaper that was a month old (Sunday edition) in the college library. This was the only place the job was advertised. Once. I had to call the HR department long distance and request a job application to be mailed to me. I was warned that any typos (my application had to be typed) or grammar errors would disqualify me.
5. I was required to address every male superior with “Mr.” and every married female superior as “Mrs.” I was encouraged to use “Miss” when speaking to single female colleagues. I could address male peer co-workers by their last name, or their first name if given permission.
6. Official communication was always by those yellow inter-office envelopes.

Yellow Inter Office Envelope from the 20th Century

1. All correspondence had to be typed out on a personal notepad that you were given at the start of your job. You received 10 notepads with your name, position title, and date of hire at the top center of the notepad. You could write informal notes to co-workers and leave them in a personal mailbox. But if you needed to communicate with a co-worker, or a person in another department, you had to type out your message in a formal style on a typewriter. It was not unusual to receive your inter-office memo returned with a note from the recipient asking you to correct your typo's, grammar, or other mistakes before your request would be processed or a return answer to your request. Each time you were promoted you received new notepads with your new title. You had to turn in the old notepads if you had any left. Using an old notepad after your promotion was grounds for dismissal. Your new promotion came with a 12 month probation period.
2. Vacation requests had to be submitted via a pre-printed form that required about 20 minutes to fill out. After you filled it out, you had to make copies for everyone in your section (Mine had about 9 people) and you left a copy of your request in their mailbox to let each person on your team that you would be taking time off. Then you sent the original form via inter-office mail to HR. You also had to enter your requested vacation on a 90 day forward looking calendar on the wall. Which I later learned that you could not request vacation more than 90 days before the occurrence. Which led to me realizing why on I would suddenly get a bunch of vacation requests in my mailbox on the third week of August and the fourth week of September. My first year there (I started in February) I had to work Thanksgiving and Christmas (double shifts) because there were no vacation slots available by the time I realized I wanted to go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not a single one of my co-workers warned me about the 90 day requirement.
3. We didn't have pagers. We didn't have cellphones. If I was not physically in the office at my workstation I had to leave a note on the team chalkboard (not whiteboard) saying what time I left and when I was to return and how I could be reached (telephone number) where I was going. I was required to call back to my office and let the secretary know I had arrived at my destination when I got there, and when I was leaving, and my expected time back at my workstation. She would document my return to the office when I returned. I had to initial her time entry on a clipboard.
4. To qualify for my first promotion I had to take a typing test that required a minimum of 45 words per minute. Typing was rarely part of my job.
5. I was prohibited, via immediate no contest dismissal, from consuming “intoxicating spirits” of any kind 24 hours before I entered the office for any shift.
6. I was prohibited, via immediate dismissal, from consuming any “intoxicating spirits” if I happened to be near my job location during a period of days off or on vacation (My office was in a large public facility). If I visited my worksite for any reason (curiosity, travel, spur of the moment) I had to be in business clothes and wearing my ID.

I stayed at that job for nine years and moved into a different career field around 1998.

P.S. More thoughts as they come back to me:

1. Any time you answered a work phone it was mandatory to say: “Hello, thank you for calling, my name is RGichard, how may I help you?”

2. Any inter-office romance between a male and female was prohibited. Immediate dismissal if found out. If you managed to conceal the romance and ended up married, as soon as HR found out you were married, one of you had to quit the department and move within the government entity to another department. You could not work in the same building, even if working for different departments. I won't comment on non traditional relationships but you can imagine the results.

3. Absolutely, positively, no exceptions don't even ask, were you allowed to bring your child, or children to the office.

4. Everything was keys. There were no badge readers, no automatic doors. At one point I had around 40 keys on a large key ring that I needed to have with me when I was out and about in the field. If I lost the key ring, I had a bond that I was required to hold to cover the cost of re-keying the master keys that I had.

5. No music, no personal music players (I had a Sony Walkman), no radio playing in the office at all. The fleet vehicles I had access to had AM radios only (the cheapest ones) and the fuses had been removed to render them inoperable.

6. It was not mandatory to attend the annual Christmas party. HR made a point of sending each and every employee an inter-office memo stating that attending the annual Christmas party was entirely optional. To be sure you understood that attending the Christmas party was voluntary, they had a HR rep at each section staff meeting in the month of December to remind everyone that attendance was purely a personal choice. They did this from 1989 to around 1995 before it stopped.