24th January 2021

 Last night I watched All the President’s Men, starring a very young Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Ah the differences in work culture between then and now. It was largely set in a giant newspaper office at the Washington Post. All the reporters were men, the few women acting as secretaries or telephonists. The senior bosses were all older men who had (correctly!) taken decades to climb the managerial ladder. All the staff were white Caucasian. Each desk held a clunky typewriter and a heavy black phone with a dial. After typing, paper was ripped from the roller (wrong), instead of first pulling down a lever and carefully taking the paper away from the platen (as I was taught.) And if you wanted to make an outside call, you needed to first ask an external (female) operator. People chain smoked, they ran along the streets for an urgent scoop and no-one was fat. Those were the days.  Government corruption, I hear you say?  Oh, nothing much different there of course...