Probably not! The last time that I saw a typing pool was at my father’s place of work when I was still at school. There was a room with a dozen or more young women at small desks evenly spaced out. Each had a typewriter as well as a typists chair. I don’t remember what else. Presiding over the operation was a fierce looking woman with her own desk at the front.

I recall that as part of his work, my father prepared a large table with assorted stats, all neatly hand written. I don’t know what they were and I was too young to understand anyway. He prepared the table by hand and then sent it to the typing pool. One of the girls typed it up. He then checked it and made sure everything still added up. He noted corrections, incorporated any necessary amendments and sent it back to the typing pool. It came back with Tippex and corrections. He then went through it again and put it back to the typing pool. Eventually it was ready for whatever it was intended for.

This whole process went on over a period of days. Haven’t things changed? Now, he would have put together a quick spreadsheet which may have taken an hour or two. He would have done this himself and then emailed it to whoever needed it.

My mother was a PA as well as a shorthand typist. She spoke about typing 1 + however many copies that were required. This meant one top copy and then sheets behind each interleaved with carbon paper. If they were doing large numbers of copies that used special thin paper. If she made a mistake, she had to correct it on every copy. I saw some secretaries who had various different colours of Tippex to use on the different coloured copies being made. The bottles would be arranged neatly along the front of their desks. It all looked very impressive.

So, what brought this wave of nostalgia? Well, you see, I have just finished writing a report. It only runs to about 8 pages but along with research and data gathering time, it has taken up the major part of each of about 6 days. No-one else was involved. It was produced on Word. I spell checked it of course and I got Helen to read over it for any obvious nonsense. She’s good at spotting my nonsense! The appendices and copy documents are saved in their own folders and I have an Excel workbook with assorted data. Once finished, the report was converted to a pdf. The whole lot was then uploaded to Dropbox and links sent to the four people who needed to read it.

Imagine if this had to be typed up in a typing pool. 1 + 5 copies (allowing for 2 file copies in the paper storage files). Mine is saved onto the office network. I imagine that a typing pool would have taken a couple of weeks to get the final version completed and corrections made.

Virtually every time I read over my report I changed something. What would the overseer of the typing pool have made of that?

I also seem to recall that both my mother’s and father’s offices had tea trolleys with real tea ladies that came trundling along the corridors, once in the morning and again in the afternoon.

Given what we now have, I cannot imagine how they got much done in those days. But, imagine what people will be saying in years to come about how backward and slow todays’ processes are. As they say, the only constant is change and it is generally always for the good. Well, that’s my opinion anyway.

Are you looking forward to what comes next?

We have seen incredible advances in recent years. Somebody once told me that the pace of change in technology had been so great that it would now plateau. We then installed Windows 95! It’s never going to stop so you must keep up. Even HMRC are embracing new technologies. We have MTD stating next year. Eventually about 5 million people will be submitting their quarterly updates. That gives HMRC access to an incredible amount of data and may trigger questions if the quarterly submissions are out of line with the end of year accounts. It will mean that pre year end or post year end adjustment designed to save tax may raise eyebrows at HMRC. Of course, they may never notice.

Then we have AI. We are already seeing its use by HMRC and clients. It is easy at the moment to spot AI created documents but as it gets more sophisticated, where will this lead?

The future is going to be fascinating. I am looking forward to it, I think.

 

Alan E Long

The Long Partnership

07770 738770