Labour Saving Devices, Whose Labour Do They Save?

Thirty years ago when I started in accountancy the practice employed four secretaries whose job it was, apart from typing letters, was to type the accounts that would be given to them by the office managers. Today we don't employ a secretary for that, or any other purpose, the accounts production software produces the accounts.

One of my first jobs each Monday, as the office junior, was to visit the local supermarket and stock up on tea, coffee, biscuits and toilet rolls. I would make coffee for all the employees and partners in the morning and tea in the afternoon, I did this on a weekly rota with the other office junior. Today, not only do we not have biscuits, we don't even have a junior! I'm not too bothered about the tea as I don't drink tea and I only drink coffee at weekends but it would be good to have a junior.

My job was supposed to have changed last December, I was going to be involved in more management decisions with clients. more troubleshooting. It hasn't happened because there is a labour shortage in the profession which means I'm doing more work that is strictly speaking below my office status. I don't mind that at all, but we are now six months down the road and nothing has changed.

Our paperless office is taking an age to set-up, it has to be done at manager level, that means two out of the three managers are involved, the third admits to not understanding a word the IT installation adviser said! It has taken me three hours each day this past week and yesterday I finally reached the letter M. For those who are reading this and understand computers we are having to set up a path between each client and a correspondence folder so that the mail in can be scanned directly to the accounts software. If you aren't computer literate and that made no sense at all thanks for dropping by anyway. The point is there are more than 600 clients that have to have a mapping path - even with my secretary standard typing speed it's a physically daunting task.

Once this is set-up mail coming in will be scanned into clients folders and a daily folder. Somebody with managerial responsibility has to do this, or at least oversee it - so we've lost a secretary and gained a mail room person with a charge out rate between £75 and £100 an hour - is that sensible? We have an auto mail system to replace the secretary, unfortunately one of my fellow managers only has one arm so she can't put letters into envelopes which means one of the accounts staff has to finish work at 4 to oversee the post and take the letters to the post office. So we've gone from a non-chargeable secretary to an envelope filler come letter poster at £30 per hour - is that sensible? We also have one of the three managers who can't type and won't learn, so that means any correspondence that involves tables or anything that a standard auto mail can't cope with must be put together by an accounts clerk rather than a secretary.

The whole rational behind the paperless office was that it would make Squirrel's job obsolete and she could be made redundant, unfortunately the tunnel couldn't be seen at the end of the light.

By the way if all I've written above has sent you to sleep or made you lose the will to live I'm sorry - please call back I promise I will write something more interesting next time - but I needed to get these thoughts down now so I can look back in six months and see how right/wrong I was.