This month's Derby Telegraph article deals with the trials and tribulations of making up pay packets in the inflation-ridden 1970s. This is the link to the article on the DT website but below is the thing itself, in print, and the unedited version in full:
It seems really odd to consider
how dependent we were on cash in the 1970s.
I thought of this after ordering some books from a U.S. supplier
online. Throughout this process I
haven't had to put my hand in my pocket once.
One tap of a button was sufficient to order the goods and add a chunk to
my burgeoning credit card balance. The
folding stuff never entered into it. Yet
it wasn't always this way.
I mentioned last month that my
cosy office environment at Wesley's in Victoria Crescent was rudely interrupted
by a spot of reorganisation in which Gwen, my office companion, was moved to
act as secretary to the M.D. Our office
was converted into a secure home for the Wages Office and Phyllis, the wages'
clerk, came to join me. About the only
thing that Phyllis and I had in common was that we both smoked but whilst I was
trying to keep a lid on my habit, Phyllis more or less chain-smoked her way
through the day.
I was to act as Phyllis's
assistant, calculating the gross pay for each employee from their respective
timesheets on Monday and helping put up the pay packets on Friday. In the intervening days, I still had to
calculate the production statistics (although this was now a doddle with my new
calculator). My week wasn't totally
filled but I had enough to do to keep me out of trouble.
Phyllis was quite a character and
I grew to be very fond of her over the months we worked together. In her style of dress, hairstyle and, to a
certain extent, attitudes she seemed as if she had been transplanted direct
from the 1940s. She was devoted to her
husband and spent a good deal of time thinking about what to get him for his
tea. She also had the odd habit of
drinking a large slug of sherry with a raw egg in it after every lunch break,
an idea which I found revolting but clearly suited her.
Friday was when Phyllis came into
her own. The cash was delivered to the
office on Friday morning (unbelievably, she used to go and fetch it from the
bank herself, accompanied by Mr. T. from the Crepe Dept. but thankfully it was
now delivered by a security firm). We
then had to make up the pay packets with the cash all folded in with the
payslip so that the details were visible without the employee having to open
the packet (in case of arguments over discrepancies).
In most cases this was reasonably
straightforward, although as rampant inflation and threshold pay increases made
their presence felt, it became difficult to prise the sheer quantity of money
into the pay packets. However, we had
one employee who presented more difficulties than most. Her father had decreed that she was not to be
trusted with any notes greater than £1 in value, which was fine in the days
when her net pay was just a few pounds but became more and more impossible as
the 1970s wore on. Prising a thick wad
of one pound notes, plus the payslip, into a pay packet became one of my least
favourite activities.
The other aspect of Fridays, at
which Phyllis excelled, was dealing with the queue of complainants who
inevitably formed by the Wages Office window every Friday afternoon, usually
after a lunchtime visit to the pub had bolstered their courage and stoked their
sense of grievance. Phyllis dealt with
this with incredible patience, her trademark cigarette in one hand as she
listened to each tale of woe.
Occasionally there was a genuine mistake to be put right but, more often
than not, it was simply a refusal to accept that the deductions were correct and
Phyllis had to patiently demonstrate how the figures had been calculated and
why they couldn't be any different. One
particularly obstreperous employee turned up every Friday afternoon, without
fail, and she had to go through this process every time. He always went away with a look that said
'you've got away with it this time, but I'll catch you out one of these
days'. He didn't!
Philip's latest collection of stories, 'The Things You See…' is now
available as a print edition from Amazon at http://mybook.to/PrintThingsYouSee,
or order through your local bookstore.
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