How did employers contact you before the cell phone?

Mail.

Yes, you would go to a job interview and they would say they would call you.

Then you would sit by your phone, and prevent anyone from making phone calls so they wouldn't get a busy signal.

Land line....at home.

Same thing I still use today, and it works good.

Definetely landlines, it wasn't uncommon too ask an unemployed friend if they wanted too go out and have them tell you "Can't waiting on a job call".

Yeah, but they couldn't bug you as much as they can nowadays :)

Are you that young AG?

before cell phones we in australia had an amazing gadget passed to us by the aboriginies .
it was called the telling bone .

hahaha, wtf is that , you put it to the earth?

Still writing $1.13 checks at the grocery store too?

Exactly.

When they needed to speak to you about ideas/changes and whatnot, it always waited until the next working day.

And instead of sending off a CC email to a bunch of people, it was good enough to just have one or two people sit in the office and speak face to face.

Now they send either a text, email or call on a cellphone and when you don't answer it...the next morning you always get the - oh I tried to get a hold of you yesterday about xyz. As if you are supposed to be reading work emails on off hours.

There are still pagers! I SEEN EM!

carrier pigeon

Land-line... answering machine connected to the telephone or telephone unit had one built in. Little tiny cassette tape that would always have to be rewound and if you had contacts that had to leave an encyclopedia of information requesting your return call, that was it for messages until you got home to rewind. Sigh.

Peace

They would call at home wanting to get dad to come on and deal with the raging winter storms.

We learned how to lie at a young age. "No dad isn't home right now. Can i take a message?"

The boss didn't want to hear " oh yeah, he's drunk and can't come in."

they would call the house....

who had cassette answering machine?

mostly drug dealers and doctors had pagers......



your private life was your private life.....


I miss those days... home phone/mail....

no cell phones/emails/internet.... or your employer bothering you 24/7...



and if it was your boss... who called your home phone number... and you didnt want to answer.... you would say... sorry, I missed that call.... I wasnt home.... lol

how many here, have done that?

Last Edited by leafar on 03/10/2017 01:02 AM

Pony express?

they used to send a guy riding a horse to give you important messages!

Pony Express

When you were super high tech, you could get to a landline to remotely check the cassette tape answering machine.

no , you insert a sim , charge it up and make calls .
sigh .

If my employer called me off work hours, I would tell him to fuck off.

They send somebody to your place to hunt you down like a rabid animal.

They still do if you turn that fucking cell phone off.

30 yrs ago I carried a cheap phone wired to a jack with alligator clips on the tip and ring. If I needed to make a call I would find a pedestal and get my 7/16 nut driver open it up and hook into a hot line and make my call. Of course back then they charged 1.50/min for ld so they were only local calls.

We usually had a two way radio system. Sat phones aren't new either. We had something of the sort. This was in the oil patch, we wasted money, because we could.

They probably walked to your office, knocked on the door and said whatever it is they wanted to say.

Back in the day, I would assume, there was no need to contact people away from work unless they were on call. People knew how to leave work at work.

By landline or mail.