Thursday, April 10, 2008

I'm a Dinosaur

I had a conversation with a coworker this morning that brought me to the realization that I am a dinosaur. I've been in the workforce since 1971, so I've seen a lot of changes in office technology. As my coworker and I began comparing notes, I thought of a lot of changes I've seen outside the office as well.

As a child:
  1. My family's first telephone number began with a word: Canal 51248. (Dialed as 2251248.)
  2. Our first telephone had a rotary dial on it instead of push buttons.
  3. Our first telephone line was "semi-private"....a line shared by two households. We'd applied for a private line but had to wait until one was available. Some of my friends had "party lines", with up to six households on the same line.
  4. There was no television cable or satellite. We got 2 stations: one NBC affiliate and one CBS affiliate. I can remember when we finally got an ABC station in our area. What a treat!
  5. The only dishwasher in the house was Mom, until my sister and I got old enough to be assigned the task.
  6. Mom had an automatic washer, but hung our laundry on a clothesline to dry. I still miss the smell of line-dried sheets.
  7. Only one mom in my neighborhood worked outside the home.
  8. On occasion, three or four families would gather on a summer evening in a backyard and make homemade ice cream. Peach was the most memorable. *drool*
  9. We ate what was put on the dinner table. Period. No special orders.
  10. Bedtime was 8:00 pm. No arguments, no whining allowed. One exception: once a week we were allowed to stay up past bedtime to watch the Red Skelton television show.
As a teenager:
  1. We all rode the school bus and didn't know we should be embarrassed by that.
  2. We didn't have video games....we played Monopoly and Canasta in the winter and badminton and croquet in the summer.
  3. If we were bored, we knew better than to mention it. Mom could always find something for us to do.
  4. We didn't go to the Mall. There wasn't a Mall.
  5. We did, however, make an occasional trip to the one McDonald's in town. Or the one Burger Chef. *drool again*
  6. If we were grounded for misbehavior, that meant no television, no phone, no visiting friends. No exceptions.
  7. No cell phones. There were actually periods of HOURS when we might be out of communication with the entire world.
  8. No instant messaging. If a friend didn't live in the local calling area, you wrote letters.....BY HAND....and put STAMPS on them....and sent them by SNAIL MAIL which was the only mail available. And it could take DAYS, maybe even WEEKS, to get a response. Letter writing was an art (at which I never excelled, unfortunately). Every girl had a box of nice stationery stashed away.
As a young lady in the workforce in the 70's:
  1. Typing was typing....on a typewriter. If you were lucky, you worked in an office that had an electric typewriter. If you were REALLY lucky, it was an IBM selectric.
  2. Deletion of a typing error was performed by use of a special eraser designed to erase typewriter ink. It had a brush on the end of it to brush the eraser crumbs out of the typewriter keys. (I actually have a typing eraser in my pencil holder on my desk as a bit of memorabilia.)
  3. There were no casual Fridays. You could wear slacks to work in some offices, but others still required more formal office attire.
  4. Xerographic copy machines were still not common. Duplication usually involved carbon paper. If there were hundreds of copies required, you used a duplicator machine or a mimeograph machine. End result was nearly always ink on a new white blouse and a slight buzz from inhalation of duplicator fluid.
  5. Electronic calculators were really expensive, so most offices still had manual adding machines. A good operator (and I was, admittedly, pretty good) could use the manual adding machine nearly as quickly as the electronics work today.
  6. "Word processing" was a non-existent term. I can remember typing 12-page leases with 4 carbon copies. No corrections were allowed, since it was a legally binding document. If, upon completion of the lease, the boss decided to add another paragraph on page 2, that meant that you retyped pages 2 through 12. There are some things about the "old days" that I do NOT miss.
  7. Personal calls were not allowed in the office. Well....maybe if there was a death in the family, but that was about it.
Like I said. I'm a dinosaur.

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