What did an office job look like before computers or cell phones? People got to the office at 9am. There was just a desk there, and a telephone. What did they even do? I know there’s an answer to this. I don’t know what it is.
Note someone just sent me. Can feel this: “I am in my 40th year of the shopping center industry. Your tweet was " It is 9:00 AM - only thing on the desk is a phone -what did people do before computers and cell phones" ? It made me think about the quality of " professional people" in our industry today and from 4 decades ago. The business I grew up in was a much better business. We are in the PEOPLE business Real Estate is what we do. There were relationships built on meeting each other rather than a cheap email and text message. You were forced to get in your car and drive to look at sites rather than google earth. You were forced to pick up the phone and cold call potential Tenants out of the yellow pages phone book and face rejection. You had to make a leasing flyer and go door to door cold calling trying to lease space. You were forced to make notes on paper and learn how to be organized. We had to make calls out of a phone booth while on the road and keep grinding. All of these " difficult " tasks I found enjoyable. It taught me " street smarts and grind" not computer smarts and poor interactive people skills. Having real estate " street moxie and hootzpah " is what will make you successful. " If more people actually learned how to sell and return a phone call and understood deals are made in the street not behind a desk and a computer they would be much more successful. I thank you for your time and for making me think about what made me successful. I wish you the best in your career.”
@realEstateTrent Everyone just sat around, waiting for technology to invent some useful stuff that they could use.
@realEstateTrent All the emails you send now? Used to be inter office memos that would walked around by people who work in the mail room.
@realEstateTrent There's a documentary about this called Mad Men.
We had an IN tray and OUT tray. We typed memos on typewriters. We used gold envelopes for more private messages and wrote the name and department of the recipient on the outside. It was sealed with a small piece of twine wrapped about a round paper button. We spent tremendous amounts of time on the phone. We had the phone numbers of dozens of our friends, clients, suppliers, memorized. We talked on the phone for hours each day. We carried Franklin Planners and kept lists of all of our contacts and maintained our calendar in them.
To correct the tiniest typo, like 1 wrong letter, we had to use either white out or correction paper. Correction paper preceded white out and was about the size of a post it. We had to go to the mistake, put the correction paper up to the page, strike the incorrect key again, which would cause dry white stuff to cover up the typo, then backspace to the now somewhat clean space and type the correct letter. For EVERy mistake!
I’m old enough to remember this. They had mainframes with dot matrix printing. They used paper for everything and there were elaborate filing systems and lots of filing cabinets. I was in audit, we used graph paper and an extensive tick marking system to record all of the ledgers we looked at. We looked at actual paper receipts. I used a typewriter extensively in high school and college. Went from a manual one to an electric one. My dad was a scientist. He just used a microscope and wrote stuff down on a notebook. 🤷♀️
I Imagine hitting the office at 9 AM, no computers, no cell phones—just you, your desk, a typewriter, and a good old rotary phone. Crazy, right? Back then, paperwork wasn’t just a figure of speech; it was literally *all* the work. Mistyped something? Time to whip out the correction fluid or start from scratch. Need to chat with someone? You'd actually walk over to their desk or give them a ring on the landline. Presentations meant pulling out physical charts and getting hands-on with your pie charts and bar graphs. It was a whole workout! This was the era of manual labor of the mind—slower, sure, but every piece of paper had a personal touch. Kind of makes you appreciate—or maybe miss—the simpler, yet busier, old-school hustle!