What did employees do before the internet?
 

I work Monday to Friday 9am-5pm. I would say i spend 7 of 8 hrs a day on the internet, whether it be checking email, surfing the web or using IM, and I still manage to do my job somewhat efficiently. I'm sure people who are more productive than I spend maybe 30-50% of their time online and still get the job done well. I know if I had the internet taken away from me at work, I would go postal and kill everyone in the office, then take my own life. My question is how did people survive pre-internet?

Right now I venturing a guess that there was lots of daydreaming, coupled with making paper airplanes, rubberband balls, and paper clip sculptures...

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

i once had a job where the refused to let me use the internet even though i had completed all my work.

i quit.

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

Books, magazines, newspapers, etc.

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

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Right now I venturing a guess that there was lots of daydreaming, coupled with making paper airplanes, rubberband balls, and paper clip sculptures...

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A lot of time was spent writing CYA memos and reports justifying your existence. And since you couldn't pass rumors and gossip via e-mail, you would grab a cup of coffee and actually walk over to somebody's office and talk to them. A very inefficient way to spread disinformation.

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

coke and hookers

note: these are still popular

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

Got bored.

I worked in accountancy where we all had pc's and did 95% of our work on them but never had internet access, before that we had these big iCL green screen things that didnt even have solataire or minesweep on them.

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

they filled out their TPS reports.

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

In the summer of '87 I worked for the Port Authority, as an assistant to some tech guys who would do predicitve failure tests on the electrical systems in the various PA facilities (WTC, JFK, LaGuardia, GWB and other bridges, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, PATH, etc.). It was a pretty cool job because I got to go into the bowels of all these places. Most fun was walking around on the open catwalks on the very top of the GWB towers. We'd usually do two jobs per day, one before and one after lunch. The jobs themselves usually went pretty quick. Most of the rest of the time would be spent driving from site to site in city traffic.

Most of the guys would time things so we got back to the office right at lunch time. After the job was done they'd get a paper and just sit in the parking lot reading it for an hour or two. I'd always have whatever I had brought to read on the train to work. At first I would feel uncomfortable. I would be thinking, shouldn't we be doing work or something? So naive back then, hehehe.

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

I have no idea. I refused to get an office job until the Internet had been widely propogated and beta tested.

Re: What did employees do before the internet?
 

as long as your boss knows you do this during work hours it is okay. if not it is stealing from your boss. unless you are just getting paid to do a specific task and not an hourly wage or a salary position.