What did people used to do at work before the internet?

I worked.



Just like I do now, except, added to the ******* phone calls, the ******* letters, the ******* phone messages left by clerical staff for you, and the ******* appearance of said ******* clerical people at your DOOR with phone messages while you are ON the phone answering all the OTHER ******* phone messages, there is now ******* EMAIL just in case there weren't enough other ways to harass you.

Wow, that's a lot o' asterisks.

****'n oath.

With 42137 posts and counting; I think it's safe to assume you have a little free time. :wink:

masturbate

They played solitaire with real cards, shopped from catalogues, and went to strip clubs on their lunch hours.

Pretty much what we do, but with the tactile stimuli.

They talked with each other.

Nimh nailed it....

T-al-k ?

uhh..

isn't that what I am doing right now?
Socializing.. ?


what is this TALK stuff..

I usedta go to court and take depositions, argue cases, that sorta junk. Came back to the office, dictated up a storm and then took a file home so that in the morning I could do it all over again.

Ugh.

I really shouldn't complain about database reporting. It be paradise compared to that.

I still think they all drank their hidden bottles of booze and smoked all day long. At the first job I ever had in a real office-type setting, I remember some of the old-timers telling me that they all used to have ashtrays at their desks and they could smoke anywhere. I think that stuff went away sometime in the mid 80s or so.

I was reading somewhere the other day that there is now a move away from work related emails, with one CEO telling everyone that he has declared his email inbox "bankrupt", and had just deleted them as he couldn't possibly find the time to respond.
He said that if anyone had sent him an email in the past week, to repeat the message on an old fashioned memo if it was important. Of the hundred or so unread emails he cleared, he only received five memos in response.
One guy said that he gave up two days of his summer vacation, simply to read and respond to the several hundred emails that had stacked up. He reckoned that at least 90% of them were of no importance.

File.

Always have time to file.

When it was part of my job, I'd say only about half of the email I got was irrelevant to my job. Not bad.




As to what people did at work before computers -- well, reread Bukowski's "Post Office."

The big boss in my department tried to pull that and then she almost opened the gas mask pack (we work on the 10th floor and the fire department ladders don't go that high so, yes, we've been assigned our own little escape packages), which is a big no-no. This happened because she had not read the email re the gas mask pack. Of course my company was not about to personally inform 60,000 or so people to not open the damned gas mask packs.

Anyway, in her case and probably in that CEOs, yeah, some of it is due to improperly sent emails, but it's also due to two things: (1) A culture of CYA all the time, 24/7, no matter what you're working on, so everyone gets copied on everything, regardless of whether it's necessary and (2) the CEO (and my big boss) aren't managing their mail properly.

I helped my direct supervisor manage her mail much better by doing three things: (1) Made 2 rules for her, one sends all of my stuff into one folder and the other sends all of the email regarding a certain data feed into another folder. Now she always knows where those things are and does not have to hunt. (2) Arranged with her that I no longer actually send her reports via email and, instead, I put them on a shared server and just send her the links. This keeps her mailbox from filling up. And (3) Taught her how to archive her email, in case, despite #2, it becomes full. She no longer complains that she can't find stuff or that her mailbox gets so full that she can no longer send and receive. Contrast this with another person on our floor who is continually complaining about this, never finds anything and is always wasting time with the clutter. The changes I made for my supervisor took, I kid you not, less than half an hour, and I also threw in making her a desktop folder of shortcuts to everywhere on the server that we keep stuff, we labeled it nicely and gave it a funky tree icon so whenever she wants reports she just double-clicks on the green tree.

It can be done.

What the hell!!! I never had a job where they let me do anything other than work!

I feel so ripped off

I had an employer who absolutely refused to use e-mail. If someone sent him an e-mail message, which i opened and read (i was the business manager, and in the office all day, while he was the engineer and electronic architect, and was rarely there), and it truly was important, he would respond with an actual letter on paper, or a phone call. I kept e-mails to a minimum by the simple expedient of keeping one e-mail box the address for which was never given except to someone with a legitimate business purpose, and to whom it was forcefully explained that it should never be given to anyone without our prior consent. He once commented that the more someone sent e-mails about a job, the less important they were as decision makers on matters related to the job, and experience bore him out on that. He also was a big believer in face-to-face communications, and had no problem driving half-way across the county, or even half-way across the state (we were in the center of the state) to meet someone personally. And he was right--face-to-face meetings not only answer questions people have, but they also allow principles to discuss matters which come up in the conversation, which would require several e-mails. Not only that, but potential problems could be obviated before they actually became problems.

The same thing applied in the era before e-mails, when the least productive employees who were not actually "front line" employees wasted dog knows how much time writing and circulating memos.

I suspect, from my own experience, that 90% or more of e-mails are useless, and that's no counting "junk" e-mails; and of the remaining 10%, most of them could have been more effectively dealt with by face-to-face meetings, or on the telephone. Not only that, but such meetings or calls eventually waste less of peoples' time than memo-writing and circulation once did, and than e-mail messages do today.

I had an ashtray on my desk as late as 2002 in a busy South Florida Sales office. After 9-11 we were taking a beating, so I took over the secretary and switchboard functions in addition to my roll as GM and literally wouldn't leave my desk for more than a minute or two at a clip, 12 hours a day. I still found time to surf the net; but seldom without two or three other things going on simultaneously. It sucked. Give me a 7 minute break to smoke outside over an ashtray, any day.

Set; I would agree with your former employer's philosophy on big ticket items (can't beat face to face)... but in smaller ticket stuff you just can't beat the efficiency of virtual business. Sure you're perhaps only half as effective; but that doesn't hurt the bottom line when you're applying your skills 5 to 10 times as often. I don't mean email to the exclusion of phone calls... but rather in addition to. Whether it's sales or customer service; telling your client to "click here, see that?" is bound to increase your effectiveness. Every call I don't field because a question was answered in an email broadcast is time (money) saved. Every sales call I do answer that was stoked by an email; increases my sales effectiveness 5-fold as opposed to placing an outgoing call. Time is money and the internet can save you every bit as much time (or more) than employees will waste on eBay. It all depends on how well you use the tool.