Comments on: Dabbler Diary: Phlegm, Flimflam, Slam

By: Brit

Brit — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:58:54 +0000

So have I. A great novel.

By: zmkc

zmkc — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:55:13 +0000

Go Toby (thinks: is he boasting or complaining?)

By: Toby

Toby — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 16:22:03 +0000

I’ve read it! Ner ner ner ner ner!

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 12:14:35 +0000

The “endless photocopying” period before computers was quite short. Until the early seventies, most offices had wet photocopiers that produced heavy, blurry photocopies at considerable cost that couldn’t be easily mailed . It was used quite selectively and nobody just ran off a dozen copies to keep everyone in the loop.

No photocopiers, faxes, couriers, affordable long-distance telephoning, computers or e-mail, and, of course, no Internet. As with our pre-historic ancestors, the business culture was much more oral. Imagine, they would go out for a three hour liquid lunch and call it a business meeting. Barbaric.

By: Gaw

Gaw — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 09:23:56 +0000

I know. I blame my own shortcomings rather than the book. How can so many Booker judges be wrong?

By: Gaw

Gaw — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 09:22:44 +0000

I suppose secretarial work was a craft trade – however, it doesn’t seem to attract the nostalgia of others now disappeared. Computers wiped out a whole class of women workers. Where are they now, I wonder?

By: Gaw

Gaw — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 09:19:00 +0000

But did this new technology give you more time for leisure or longer working hours? It seems strange how making things easier has resulted in more work, for example in journalism, advertising, banking. I suspect the effect is indirect, in that technology increases competition within an industry as well as the hand of management and it’s these forces that bear down on employees. As a non-employee, perhaps you could be the ‘control’?

By: zmkc

zmkc — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 20:59:46 +0000

Nobody ever got through Midnight’s Children did they? I have never met anyone who did, despite initially feeling an ‘insane optimism’ about the enterprise, similar to the one you refer to re Blair and Thatcher. Something happens about halfway through the book that makes enthusiasm evaporate; it seems to be an almost universal reaction ( although presumably the Booker judges didn’t experience it?)

By: Mary

Mary — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 14:28:07 +0000

Photocopying? None of that technological wizardry when I started work as a lowly ‘secretary’. Carbon sheets fitted between four or five sheets of paper and squeezed onto the typewriter roller. If you made a mistake you laboriously tippexed out the offence on each separate piece of paper. It taught you to be careful, at least.

When I moved on to higher things, there was one photocopier for the organisation. All documents for photocopying had to be accompanied by a chitty signed by your immediate manager and your departmental head. You could wait days for the chitty to come back signed. In desperation, I took to forging the signatures.

Of course, you could always go for the banda machine option, even though the purple ink got all over your fingers.

By: John Halliwell

John Halliwell — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 20:32:27 +0000

I remember when caller recognition was introduced on the internal phone system. Handset pick-up immediately reduced by 50%. On the first day Bob B phoned me from the warehouse, unaware of the introduction of such dazzling technology, his name boldly announced on my 3″ x 1″ screen: “Hello, Bob, what can I do you for?” Bob, as quick as a flash: “Blimey, John, is my hair straight?”