Office life in the Sixties
Elizabeth Caine recalls working as a secretary in the smoke-filled offices of the Seventies
Istarted my career as a secretary in 1977, so have plenty of anecdotes to share with younger colleagues. However, they’re mostly met with quiet amusement. In fact, from their reactions you’d think I was talking about the Stone Age! My attempts at describing the intricacies of using a manual typewriter are met with looks of incredulity. No photocopiers for us, I tell them, as I explain that ‘cc’ literally meant carbon copy. Manipulating flimsy pieces of carbon-coated paper between copy paper and then feeding them carefully through the roller mechanism on the typewriter was no mean feat. Whoever set the tasks for the typewriting examinations must, I am convinced, have possessed sadistic tendencies. Why else would they have required us to make six carbon copies? Manual typewriters did have advantages, though, one of which was that they rarely broke down. Work did not come to a standstill, as it does today, with a computer network problem! Another advantage was that we became accurate typists. After all, no-one wanted to go to the trouble of correcting errors by using a typing eraser that was so hard it left a gaping hole in the paper if you applied more than the slightest amount of pressure. We thought we were at the forefront of technology when electric typewriters arrived. What I found most amazing was that they allowed your typing to scroll on to the next line without having to use the carriage return, ahem, key. “How does it know when you’re ready to go onto the next line?” I’d ponder. As for the move to word processors, that was something else. Those early machines were dedicated standalone word processors, whose printers were so loud they had to be encased in large Perspex hoods. However, not having to retype an entire document for the sake of a couple of errors was most welcome. Gone were the days of typing endless copies of the same draft. I remember the agony of my first training course in word processing. How I struggled to understand how the letters I typed appeared on a screen – as I typed them! And where was the paper? The telephones we used were another piece of office equipment that wouldn’t be out of place in a museum today. The office phones were push button, which we thought was the height of sophistication, replacing the rotary phones where to make the call you had to rotate the dial to the number you wanted and then release. In those days, the only way of getting urgent messages to people who weren’t near a telephone was by using a pager. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we were taken aback with the arrival of mobile phones. It took me a while to realise that they were really not just the same as walkie-talkies! I recall watching a science fiction film that was set about 100 years in the future. People were contacting each other by phone, but the person’s image appeared on a screen simultaneously. I laughed as I thought, ‘as if’. I remembered this when I recently organised a Skype conference. The changes in technology inevitably led
‘The only way of getting urgent messages to people not near a phone was by a pager’
to changes in the role of PA. Back then, you would open and date stamp the post, then go in with your boss ‘for dictation’. You would go through each letter and he would tell you whether to reply to it (with a suitably dictated letter), to forward it to someone, to file it or to chuck it in the bin. Dealing with all this took up most of my day, although there were other duties, such as arranging and minuting meetings, and managing the boss’s diary. Nowadays the boss deals with most of his correspondence himself by email. Secretaries or PAs have taken on a broader role. And it’s not only technology that’s changed, of course. Employment law has seen some major changes, such as the introduction of maternity leave. I became pregnant with my first child when it was more normal for women not to return to work after the birth. A personnel (or HR in today’s speak) manager explained to me that while I would be allowed to return to work, it wasn’t really something they encouraged. And this was in a fairly progressive organisation. I don’t know what she would have made of paternity leave! As for smoking in the office… nowadays it seems hard to believe that smoking at work was quite normal. I remember only too well carrying on conversations through a mist of hazy smoke. Ashtrays were as much a piece of office equipment as paper clips! The career path has also changed. Back then, the usual route into secretarial work started in college, with courses in shorthand and typewriting. I remember the hours of typing drills we did to a certain rhythm, sometimes accompanied by music on an LP. We had to learn how to change the ink ribbons when they ran out. Centring headings and creating tables involved counting the number of characters and doing calculations to work out where to start. Boxes around tables were drawn with a pen and ruler, again with the help of calculations. Once qualified, your usual career path started as a typist or shorthand typist from which you could become personal secretary and, finally, for those who took their career to its ultimate goal, the coveted role of personal assistant. Today, secretarial training as such is harder to find unless you want to pay for it, and people tend to move directly into the role of personal assistant. Is there anything that hasn’t changed? Well, the role of PA is still, in a nutshell, to make your boss’s life as easy as possible. However, if you ask me, what I think is the most important skill a personal assistant can have, I would say anticipate his or her needs, so that when you are asked to do a job, you can say ‘I’ve already done it’. And that certainly hasn’t changed.
‘Secretarial training today is harder to find unless you want to pay for it’