High-Tech

Since starting with Grand Met Hotels on 5th January 1976, I had made good, steady progress within the team and had settled down to the routine. As with all jobs, good weeks, boring weeks and occasionally excellent ones.
 
I had somehow always managed to dodge the Europa Hotel in Belfast and not witnessed any IRA bomb in London. Working from just off Oxford Street, frequently using the underground and spending most of our time in potential high-class prime target hotels - Mayfair, a couple of hotels at Grosvenor Square, Knightsbridge ... in fact anywhere was a potential target. Luckily there hadn't been a bomb on the UK mainland since the Hilton Hotel in London in September 1975. One got used to it, sadly.
 
I don't know why this rather posh form was suddenly required by the Personnel Dept. On amazing new "self-carboned" paper that was sweeping through the offices and shops of the UK. The days of blue and black fingers from horrible carbon paper were doomed.
 
In fact, we had been rolling out so-called "Computer" systems in the hotels. Took quite a long time as a special air-conditioned room had to be built to accommodate the huge banks of machines.
 
The accounting books in the hotels were increasingly no longer on handwritten forms and ledgers. Indeed in the larger hotels, we had been using large electric NCR cash registers with stiff cards that recorded the customer's transactions. When he ate in the restaurant and signed the bill, someone would take the receipt down to reception where the rooms A4 sized card would be found in a register, but in the slot in the NCR machine and then all sorts of keys and buttons pressed to get the room number, Balance b/f, type of transaction, department, amount and then the machine pulled in the card, whirred away and spat it out with a new "Balance c/f". Times were a changing - Credit cards were becoming as popular as cheques that is, if the receptionist hadn't somehow managed to mess up the credit card companies form (still with carbon paper sets) and push it through the machine so fast that the numbers on our copy smeared and the charge was later rejected by Amex, Diners, and Barclaycard and the customer back home in some Argentinian outpost.
 
Times were indeed changing. Some hotels were now equipped with self-dialling phones in the rooms and putting a special breed of ladies out of work. They sat in dark broom cupboard sized rooms in front of a massive wooden console-like desk and with a battery of cords with plugs and a headphone and little white round ivory looking stickers with all the room numbers listed and each extension in the various offices and public rooms.
Ring Ring - cord pulled and inserted into a plug.
"Good evening, Sir, how may I help you"
" What number do you wish to call?"
Another cord plugged in a hole and the number dialled on the circular dial. International numbers took a minute to get dialled.
Then wait for the number at the other end to start ringing.
"Hello Sir, your number is ringing" and swiftly various plugs were pushed in and other pulled out and whizzed back on elastic cords into the bowels of the vast desk.
 
One of the first things I was told when I started at the 4* St George’s Hotel as a student apprentice in 1974, was: “Never learn to use the telephone switchboard or else you will always end up there when the telephonist is ill and that is nearly always the weekend night shifts.” I followed this advice to the letter. Phone charges in hotels was a very good and profitable source of income. Though each call had to hand recorded – Room number, Number called, time, duration and cost and remember there were a whole multitude of area rates never mind country rates.
 
The telex machine had been around for a while. a thin perhaps one-inch wide band which was full of holes which could either be punched when wanting to send one or came out the machine with the holes if receiving one. I honestly don't remember how they worked. We were actually quite well equipped now with the typewriter sort that made things much easier. A bit frightening if you were having a snooze behind the reception and suddenly the machine clattered into action with an incoming message. Customers telexes cost them real good money. High Tech has its price.
 
The Kalamazoo hand filled and calculated carbon copy form system was a real boon in those days especially for things like payroll. If you got a good clerk with neat handwriting it was a joy to work with. Looking for a link in 2018 and assuming Wiki would have one, I found nothing but a bit of history on the Kalamazoo Australia site. Nobody born after … 1970 would have a clue what one is talking about.
Our head office accounts department did at least have a huge punch card machine to do the accounts and payroll, It was Ok when it worked, a disaster when it chewed up the cards.
 
And so we signed the form and the personnel file now contained two A4 sheets of paper. As it transpired a few years later, they knew virtually nothing about me as there wasn’t even a CV, an application letter, an acceptance letter ……..