1987

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fixedfixer

Veteran
Bought my first house, mortgage rate was something like 14.5% :eek:.
 

Hacienda71

Mancunian in self imposed exile in leafy Cheshire
I spent 87 riding a Vespa and dancing at all nighters at the twisted wheel in Manchester. Spare money was spent at Laveries a tailors on a back street near Piccadilly getting suits and trousers made up. The casuals who hung around The Arndale in their Farah flares, Samba trainers and Kappa coats used to fight us for being different.
 

Gravity Aided

Legendary Member
Location
Land of Lincoln
Minnesota Twins beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, 4 games to three.
I saw The Last Emperor by myself, but took a little student secretary to see Fatal Attraction, and that was Mrs. GA, to this day. We got married a couple of years later. Your HST went 148 mph,and that German guy(Matthias Rust) landed a plane in Red Square, which I was just thinking about yesterday, which is what I was already thinking about 1987 for.
 
Other things about work in 1987, you had to wear a tie, working hours were rigid and strictly enforced, there was a sports and social club on site where it was quite normal to see some of the senior managers down several pints most lunchtimes, the computer building was no smoking but at all other offices people smoked at their desks, a tea trolley used to come round mid morning and mid afternoon, and even in the computing dept we didn’t have PC’s or even dumb terminals on our desks. Only the managers had a PC, they used it for Gantt charts and the like. Programmers had acces to a bank of dumb terminals, about 1 terminal for every 5 staff, so we had a rota system for using them. So most of your time as a programmer was spent at your computer free desk looking paper printouts scribbling down what you would next do once you got time at a terminal later that day.
 
Distinctions between management and staff were very much the thing. Once promoted to a management grade you were no longer allowed to continue sitting at the same desk with your former colleagues, you had to move to an enclosed office for one. There was a catalogue from which you could choose your office furniture, it was grade specific so if you got promoted again you were able to choose more upmarket stuff to reflect your new status. You were also expected to take your lunch in the management dining room rather than the staff canteen, in the dining room you had waitress service at your table and a set three course lunch. On some sites management and staff had separate toilets too.
 
It was always considered a great jolly to visit the other Rolls-Royce sites, not least because your host would be allowed visitors tickets for their guest and themselves to the management dining room. Visits to Bristol were quite common but not very exciting as you had to take a company bus to get there. Visits to East Kilbride were much talked about because it involved a flight over the Lake District. Best of all were the visits to places where the company reckoned you needed a car to get to, eg. Ansty or Leavesden, for these the company had a hire car delivered to your door. Always something new and quite smart, most of us grads didn’t have a car or if we did it was old and battered so this definitely made a good jolly.
 
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