When I started working in an office in the early 1980s, we smoked cigarettes at our desks, banged out articles on heavy typewriters and at lunchtime decamped to the office canteen or the pub for a hotplate of shepherd’s pie. Everything I’ve written since then about modern offices – the wireless, smokeless, noiseless places where we now work – has been coloured by my memory of how things used to be.
But now I find my sense of history is all skewed. I’ve just finished making a series for Radio Four about the past 250 years of office life, and have discovered half the things I thought of as new fads turn out not to be new at all; while many things I took to be eternal facts of office life are actually rather recent. There are, however, some constants – like lust and boredom – as well as some things that have gone for ever. The tea lady isn’t coming back.
