Working At Rank Xerox

A Memory of Mitcheldean.

As a 16-year-old, I started work in the wages office of Rank Xerox. There were 6 of us in the office, the boss being Fred Pearce. The other colleagues were Roger Dymond, Mary Evans, Connie Waits, Jean Short and myself. The company used to make cine cameras and projectors and was just begininig to make photocopiers.
We used the Kalamazoo system for the doing the wages (no computors in those days), everything was done by hand. We spent the week working out what bonuses the workers had made and transfering the data onto their clock cards. The day I liked the best was a Friday when the cash was delivered, the door locked, then we spent the morning making up the wage packets. In the afternoon I would have to go around to all the departments and hand out the wages. There was a small shoe shop in the village of Mitcheldean and I would love to go there and choose shoes. The owner was good enough to let us have them on a pay week by week basis. I spent 5 happy years working there but left in 1963, a few months before the birth of my first child. Happy Days.

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