Back in the 80s
I worked in a large building in the City for a big firm of insurance brokers, seven floors, very open plan, helped by the fact that there was a huge atrium in the middle that had escalators going up the sides.

I was office-based, and looking back now, we did very little work - as long as you got the important stuff done, you could pretty much spend the day taking the piss, chatting, smoking and drinking coffee - if anyone pulled you up for slacking, you could say you were waiting for something to come back from typing (no computers then), or waiting for one of the brokers who had to go out to the Lloyd's Building each morning to talk to insurers about the risks we needed to cover to come back.

Now these guys had the best gig going - they'd pop out of the office mid-morning, go into Lloyd's for a while (plus any company offices they needed to go to), but pretty much spent the whole day on the piss, including lunching with the people they needed to see work-wise, so they could expense that.

More often than not, they would come back shit-faced, just as the working day was drawing to a close. Sometimes you wouldn't see them till the next morning. And one had a breakdown mid-afternoon, threw all his work off London Bridge and never came back at all.

Unfortunately I was on holiday the time one of the directors came back and threw up in his waste paper bin.

Oh back to the open plan/atrium bit mentioned at the start - we once bet one of my office-based colleagues to walk around the entire building from 9-5 with a file under his arm to see if anyone would challenge him - no-one did, even though he must have gone round every part of the building several times.

Happy days.
(Capo, Thu 8 Jan 2009, 13:06, Reply)