Do you remember?
Carbon paper
Rolls (not single sheets) of slick photocopy paper
Typewriter erasers
Liquid ink toner cartridges for the photocopy machine (and I had the clothes to prove it!)Correct Tape
Onion skin paper
Shorthand (I still have that!)
Taking dictation
Dictaphones
Turquoise blue dictation sleeves (not the cassette tapes; before tapes we had round blue sleeves that had what looked like phonograph grooves where the dictation was located)
The invention of Liquid Paper
The invention of the fax machine
When everyone had a name plate
When we always wore a dress
What else can you remember? Let me know.
How I remember my very first office job, just as if it were yesterday. I graduated from high school on a Friday night and started to work for this company the following Monday.
I remember my first paycheck. I made $70.00 gross and thought that I was rich! My net monthly salary covered a car payment, medical insurance, clothing and entertainment. (I still lived at home when I first started this job and did so until later in 1975 when I got married.)
I would sit and take dictation for hours on end. I loved shorthand and still do! If I have to do shorthand for more than an hour now, I get cramps in my fingers and wrist. Not so back then. I could sit all day and it didn't bother me a bit.
Then we graduated to dictation film. I'm not talking about the cassette tapes, but the transparent blue round cylinders that slid into the machine for dictation. Remember the strip of paper that went with them and you had to put it on to see the little marks where the boss had made corrections? That seems so long ago.
Then came the Dictaphone with cassette tapes, big ones at first and then came the small tapes. I don't think they are in use much anymore. So many bosses are now computer literate that they type their own notes and letters. I still get their drafts for formatting though.
Don't you wish you had invented Liquid Paper, a/k/a White Out? What a grand idea! If only we had thought of it....
Bette Nesmith Graham (1924 - 1980)
Did you know?
Liquid Paper was actually the brainchild of a quick-thinking woman with poor typing skills. Bette Nesmith Graham, in an effort to cover her typing mistakes, decided to do what painters did when they made mistakes -- she painted over them. With a bottle of white paint and a watercolor brush, Graham started on the road to fame and fortune as the inventor of Liquid Paper.
At age 17, Graham got a secretarial job. She worked her way up from the typing pool to executive secretary, but found a large hurdle along the way -- electric typewriters. These new inventions (and her typing errors) caused her all sorts of problems. The carbon-film ribbons in the new machines made a mess when Graham tried to fix her mistakes with a pencil eraser.
The inspiration to solve her predicament came from holiday window painters who simply brushed over smudges and flaws in their work. She decided the trick would work for her and covered her mistakes with a white, water-based paint.
In 1956, Graham's invention was so popular that she was making batches of "Mistake Out" in her kitchen and garage. When demand skyrocketed, she changed the name to "Liquid Paper" and applied for a patent and a trademark.
By 1975, the company employed 200 people, made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper and distributed the product to 31 countries. Graham sold the company four years later to Gillette Corporation for $47.5 million.
Interesting tidbit: Bette was the mother of Michael Nesmith, a member of The Monkees, a popular 1960's singing group. Remember "Last Train to Clarksville "?