It was 30 years ago today

Actually it was thirty years ago last Thursday but seeing as how you probably aren’t reading this on the day I wrote it, it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, it was thirty years ago last Thursday that a young, fresh-faced and not especially ambitious young lad (me), set out to make his way in the world, beginning his very first day at work.
OK, that’s not entirely true either. I’d already seen service as a newspaper boy, a stockroom gofer and a milk deliveree but those were just part-time jobs, on the weekend and before school. No, on January 29, 1979 I set out into the big wide world to make my mark in the glamorous and adrenaline-filled field of...banking!

Yep, I thought you’d be impressed.

Ah, thirty years. Where have they gone? I of course, haven’t changed a bit, although the world seems to have moved on considerably. In those days, if you wanted to withdraw money from your bank account, you had to find time to visit the branch office during opening hours (which bore no resemblance to anybody’s work hours, including those of the bank staff), stand in line and wait while a cashier actually counted out the money and handed it to you. Imagine! I can’t remember the last time I set foot inside my bank and I doubt I’ve been in there more than half a dozen times since opening the account. But back in 1979, nobody gave a thought to ATM’s and how they would change our lives.

Or email, come to that. Way back then, if a customer wanted to communicate with us, they either came in to the branch, or they wrote a letter. The boss then hand wrote replies to all the letters we received; a dozen or two a day, before giving them to the secretary who typed them up, put them in envelopes and stuck stamps on them. At around 4:30, the office junior (me again) carried them down to the post office for mailing. If a client received a response in 3 or 4 days they were happy.
But then we started hearing about this wonderful invention called email. Get this…you could type a letter on a computer, hit a button and a few seconds later, the recipient would be able to read it on their computer. How cool is that?

Leisure time.

That’s how they sold it to us. With the implementation of email, we would all have a whole heap of leisure time, to travel, to further our education, to interact with our families. Yeah, how’s that working out for everyone? Nowadays I process 100-200 emails every day and have clients who complain if they don’t hear back from me within 30 minutes. The fact that I might have been in a meeting, or working with somebody else, or lying dead in a ditch somewhere apparently never enters their heads.

But in 1979, email was still just a futuristic fantasy. Who would be able to afford a computer of their own anyway? Actually, the bank for which I worked was quite technologically advanced in that we did have computers, and not just up on the second floor like most of our competitors. No, ours were right there by the tills. Not laptops obviously, or even desk tops – monitors were still some time away. No, these were big, noisy and somewhat scary appliances, about 4 feet high with a keyboard the size of a coffee table and levers, arms and spindles which clattered and banged away incessantly. It was hard enough hearing what the customers were saying through the layers of bullet proof glass which separated us from them without these darn things clanking away. Oh, how we hated them.

Fortunately, they broke down fairly regularly and for a few days at a time, peace reigned until Albert the Mechanic came to work his magic. For a mechanic Albert was, equipped not only with screwdrivers, but with wrenches, rags and oil cans. He also had toxic B.O. and a face like a pizza, but he was a nice guy and we all liked him. As with everything else, computers have moved on since 1979 and I often wonder if Albert the Mechanic was able to make the transition to writing code or if he simply went on to fixing traction engines or steam locomotives or something.

That other labor saving device, the cell-phone, hadn’t been inflicted on us either which meant that when you walked out the office door, you were incommunicado until you walked back in. “He isn’t here right now, can I take a message?” was a perfectly acceptable response to a caller. The idea of having to eat lunch while listening to a conference call was unheard of. No beepers, Blackberries or any other type of electronic leash. Nobody sat in hotel rooms sending messages to customers at 11:30 at night back then and if they had done, the customer certainly wouldn’t respond 5 minutes later as one of mine did a couple of weeks ago. Oh, those were the days. But here’s a funny thing. It’s possible time has fogged my memory, but I seem to remember I had more leisure time in 1979, not less. Go figure.

What will the workplace be like 30 years from now, I wonder. I’ll be 76 by then, and given the state of my savings account and a pension plan which is performing so badly I think I owe it money, there’s a fairly good chance I’ll be wearing a paper hat and interacting with my clients by asking them if they would like fries with that.

Or maybe not. Maybe one of these labor-saving appliances will actually save labor instead of simply adding to it. Perhaps right now Bill Gates is working on a device which really will give us more leisure time and less on the hamster wheel.

I mean, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?