When I first started at work, there were no fax machines nor any other form of instant communication such as texting or emails. There was a telex machine but, apart from one of the senior ladies in admin, no-one really knew how to work the damned thing. It was also a matter of taking your life in your hands to wantonly attempt to distract aforesaid matriarch from her normal duties in order to get her to (grumpily) send a telex for you.
There was always, of course, the letter, and what is now colourfully known as ‘snail mail’. The procedure was to handwrite your letter, pass it to the typist, wait a day or so for it to come back, check it, circle the (often numerous) corrections and alterations, return it, wait for it to come back for the second time, sign it, put it in the outgoing post tray and wait. The whole thing took around a week to ten days to get from saying to a client, “I’ll drop you a line to confirm that”, to it arriving on their desk.
The only way of doing business was to operate a ‘handshake’ system. I put ‘handshake’ in inverted commas because you didn’t actually meet up – you shook hands metaphorically over the phone with the parting comment “Paperwork to follow”.
Of course it would have been only too easy to say one thing and mean another. But, if you did that, word would rapidly go around that you could not be trusted. The velocity with which this could happen would call into question Einstein’s conjecture that the speed of light cannot be exceeded – it could if you’d been nabbed ratting on a deal!
It’s easy to see the past through rose-tinted glasses but it was definitely true to say that you were only as good as your word. If that meant nothing then so did you.
Nowadays communications are instant. Our muddle-headed secretary with her bottle-bottomed glasses would serve even less of a purpose than she did 35 years ago. I (and my colleagues, too) type out our own emails, write out our own faxes and only send the occasional bulky document or circular by snail mail.
We no longer conduct business in the same way. I found myself turning away from the old system of trust when faxes first came out. Rather than discussing things in detail, I would casually tell people to ‘jot it down and send it to me to read’. That would have been unconscionable when I first started work – my boss would have shouted, “YOU DID WHAT???” at me if I’d been caught being so slack. I would have been on paperclip untangling duties for weeks afterwards.
The expectation of trust has been destroyed. Once upon a time, my clients would ask me to read out any ‘important clauses’ in the contracts or documents I was drafting. In other words, I was being trusted not just to relay the text but also to select which text to read to them.
It is the convention now to couch phrases carefully, hide important text away in the ‘small print’, and to always have an eye for ‘getting one over’ on the unwary or naïve.
Electronic communications (and I wouldn’t be without them) have taken us to the diametric opposite of where we used to be. With the exception of individual relationships (of course they must still exist), there is no longer any universal importance placed on being ‘straight with someone’.
This isn’t just a white collar or boardroom issue – it’s percolated down to all corporate levels. Anyone who trusts something important that isn’t very clearly written down (and signed and dated) is deemed a gullible fool. Why should this be?
We watch, helpless, as the unscrupulous build empires on promising one thing and delivering another. They hide behind laws which have become ever more onerous and presumptive of non-verbal agreements. What has been written down is always the most important element in any contract-related court case.
We reap what we sow. If we are foolish to trust then the converse is also true – it is foolish to trust us. It has become quaint or naive to assume that a verbal promise means anything.
The net result is that our claims-conscious, mistrustful attitude has made us an isolated society. We all exist on little islands and only interact with the greatest suspicion. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to put the blame for this on the campaigns of various political parties but politicians have nothing new to say – they all merely ‘go with the flow’. If they didn’t no-one would vote for them, after all.
No, and in my own humble opinion, the rot set in when we stopped listening and started writing.
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