This month's Derby Telegraph 'nostalgedy' article is all about how some very small technological advances can make a big difference to your working life, particularly in the 1970s.
You can find the article (with more photos and links to others in this series) on the DT website here. Or read the unedited full version, below:
And this is the unedited original text:
When we talk about technological
advances and their impact on the workplace, I can't help but think how two pieces
of technology could easily have made me redundant from my job as a Statistical
Clerk at Wesley's in Victoria Crescent, Burton in the 1970s.
Wesley's were not known for their
spendthrift nature. Even the machinery
on which their manufacturing depended was either ancient beyond belief or
second-hand. Therefore, I half expected
I would be given an abacus when I enquired about having a desktop calculator. Up to this point, I had been laboriously
calculating production statistics via prodigious feats of long division. To my surprise, after some weeks of careful
consideration, a brand new calculator appeared.
Admittedly, it was about the size of a small laptop computer, weighed
about the same and had the sort of display (which my research reliably informs
me are called nixie tubes) that tended to fizz and blink out when it felt like
it. In terms of functionality, it didn't
have much but what it did was to enable me to make, in a matter of minutes,
calculations which had taken hours and reams of paper. I could now do, in less than a day, that
which had taken up half my week!
The actual make and model of my first calculator
The second technological advance which
affected me, related to how I shared my calculations. In the past, I had copied out a sheet of
figures, showing the production cost and production rate per unit, for all of
the departments so that each Department Head had a copy as well as the Works
Manager and Managing Director. This took
some time but at least forced me to develop a nice, neat style of writing. Then, wonder of wonders, we invested in a photocopier. Before you get carried away, this wasn't
something the size of a small car which could print and staple entire
manuscripts in the blink of an eye. No,
this was a device about the size of a modern-day inkjet printer, which operated
much like a scanner.
It was something of a convoluted
process. First you had to place the
original face down, covered by a sheet of pink flimsy paper which acted as a
sort of film, on the scanner plate. The
document was scanned (for how long depended on the degree of exposure you set
it to) and then you removed the pink paper, carefully aligned it with a sheet
of A4 photocopy paper and allowed both sheets to go through a pair of rollers
at the front of the device. If you were
lucky and nothing had happened to crease or wrinkle the papers on their transit,
a reasonably good copy came out, albeit almost always blackened around the edge
and a bit blurred here and there. If you
wanted another copy, you had to do the same thing all over again, you couldn't
just re-use the pink paper.
Overall, it wasn't remarkably
quicker to photocopy than it was to write the thing out in the first place, but
it was fascinating to watch and it wasn't long before even the most
technophobic managers found the necessity to make copies of everything and you
had to join a queue.
The combination of these two
technological leaps forward meant that I could now complete my week's work in
the space of a day and was struggling to find something to fill my time. However, two things happened to change all of
that. Firstly, my cosy and very sociable
set-up with Gwen and Paul in our office came to an end when she went to become
the secretary to the MD in the main office block and Paul, our youngest
manager, was given his own office.
It was decreed that my office
would now become the Wages Office and it was altered accordingly, with mesh
wiring for all of the windows, the ancient safe moved down and a sort of
serving hatch created for dealing with employee queries. I was to be joined by Phyliss, the wages
clerk and I was to help her with the payroll, which would be a whole new string
to my bow, as I'll tell you next time.
You can find all of Philip's stories collected in the five books of his
'nostalgedy' series at
The Nostalgedy Collectionand, check out the latest 5 star review of the new collection "The Things You See..." here.
