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Wednesday 28 February 2018

Making a Packet in the Wages Office


This month's Derby Telegraph article deals with the trials and tribulations of making up pay packets in the inflation-ridden 1970s.  This is the link to the article on the DT website but below is the thing itself, in print, and the unedited version in full:



It seems really odd to consider how dependent we were on cash in the 1970s.  I thought of this after ordering some books from a U.S. supplier online.  Throughout this process I haven't had to put my hand in my pocket once.  One tap of a button was sufficient to order the goods and add a chunk to my burgeoning credit card balance.  The folding stuff never entered into it.  Yet it wasn't always this way.
I mentioned last month that my cosy office environment at Wesley's in Victoria Crescent was rudely interrupted by a spot of reorganisation in which Gwen, my office companion, was moved to act as secretary to the M.D.  Our office was converted into a secure home for the Wages Office and Phyllis, the wages' clerk, came to join me.  About the only thing that Phyllis and I had in common was that we both smoked but whilst I was trying to keep a lid on my habit, Phyllis more or less chain-smoked her way through the day. 

I was to act as Phyllis's assistant, calculating the gross pay for each employee from their respective timesheets on Monday and helping put up the pay packets on Friday.  In the intervening days, I still had to calculate the production statistics (although this was now a doddle with my new calculator).  My week wasn't totally filled but I had enough to do to keep me out of trouble.

Phyllis was quite a character and I grew to be very fond of her over the months we worked together.  In her style of dress, hairstyle and, to a certain extent, attitudes she seemed as if she had been transplanted direct from the 1940s.  She was devoted to her husband and spent a good deal of time thinking about what to get him for his tea.  She also had the odd habit of drinking a large slug of sherry with a raw egg in it after every lunch break, an idea which I found revolting but clearly suited her.

Friday was when Phyllis came into her own.  The cash was delivered to the office on Friday morning (unbelievably, she used to go and fetch it from the bank herself, accompanied by Mr. T. from the Crepe Dept. but thankfully it was now delivered by a security firm).  We then had to make up the pay packets with the cash all folded in with the payslip so that the details were visible without the employee having to open the packet (in case of arguments over discrepancies).
 
In most cases this was reasonably straightforward, although as rampant inflation and threshold pay increases made their presence felt, it became difficult to prise the sheer quantity of money into the pay packets.  However, we had one employee who presented more difficulties than most.  Her father had decreed that she was not to be trusted with any notes greater than £1 in value, which was fine in the days when her net pay was just a few pounds but became more and more impossible as the 1970s wore on.  Prising a thick wad of one pound notes, plus the payslip, into a pay packet became one of my least favourite activities.

The other aspect of Fridays, at which Phyllis excelled, was dealing with the queue of complainants who inevitably formed by the Wages Office window every Friday afternoon, usually after a lunchtime visit to the pub had bolstered their courage and stoked their sense of grievance.  Phyllis dealt with this with incredible patience, her trademark cigarette in one hand as she listened to each tale of woe.  Occasionally there was a genuine mistake to be put right but, more often than not, it was simply a refusal to accept that the deductions were correct and Phyllis had to patiently demonstrate how the figures had been calculated and why they couldn't be any different.  One particularly obstreperous employee turned up every Friday afternoon, without fail, and she had to go through this process every time.  He always went away with a look that said 'you've got away with it this time, but I'll catch you out one of these days'.  He didn't!

Philip's latest collection of stories, 'The Things You See…' is now available as a print edition from Amazon at http://mybook.to/PrintThingsYouSee, or order through your local bookstore.



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