My first job had a starting time of 9.30, finishing time of 5 o'clock, a 15-minute morning coffee break and an hour for lunch. If you had to work late you were paid overtime but, for many of us, that was a rare enough occurrence.
I don't know if people actually get paid overtime any more, because many companies now pay better starting salaries on the assumption that staff will stay until any job is finished. If that means a 12-hour working day or longer, so be it. In some companies it is a badge of honour to be the last to leave at night.
In fact, in one of the places I worked, people would hang spare jackets over the back of their chairs before they left in the evening so the boss would think they were still around somewhere, putting in extra hours. I don't know whether that ruse was truly effective, but I do know that many of the guys dreaded being the first to get up from the desk and go home. When they couldn't face actually working any more they'd stand around chatting, or networking (depending on your point of view).
People also used to accrue substantial amounts of leave because they didn't like to be seen to be taking holidays. They were forced to forgo these accruals at the end of the leave-year since it wasn't possible to roll it into the following year. (This after someone had managed to accumulate a few months' worth of un-taken days!)
According to a report for the travel industry which I saw recently, people are going on shorter holidays on the basis that they don't want to leave the office for more than a week at a time.
Whether this is because they fear they'll lose their place in the pecking order, or whether they think that the business is changing so fast they'll miss something if they go for two weeks, or even whether they believe that they are totally indispensable, wasn't clear from the report. But the fortnight's holiday is, apparently, under threat from modern lifestyles.
Maybe a few week-long holidays during the year are better for you than a block of two weeks. But it's usually not until the second week of a holiday that you begin to unwind. Admittedly, just in time to go home and face the traffic jams again, but at least you've finally managed to put the actual stress of leaving the office behind you for a couple of days.
But now, when people go on holiday, they usually leave their mobile number with someone in the office. It's disconcerting to be sitting by the pool and listening to someone freaking out on the mobile because the consignment from Stockholm didn't arrive when it was supposed to. But I witnessed it last year.
The working day is getting longer, partly because so many companies now deal with so many different time zones, and partly because with home computers, email and mobile phones, people are accessible all the time. There's no point in saying you didn't know about the early-morning meeting when the company secretary mailed you an urgent notice about it the night before. You can't pretend not to have heard the phone when it's belting out a few bars of the William Tell Overture from your top pocket.
Flexible working hours have generally meant that people have to be flexible about working for longer. The monetary rewards are there for people who work hard, without a doubt, even if the option of saying No doesn't seem to exist any more.
I was lectured by an old friend recently when I asked how his employees felt about the fact that they were consistently working 12-hour days. He told me that while the economy was booming it was everyone's duty to work as hard as they could and earn as much as they could before the good times ceased to roll.
Many of today's workforce, particularly in the technology sector, receive generous stock options as a way to keep them happy. Some are looking at big payoffs in five or seven years' time. All they have to do is be at the beck and call of the company in the meantime. And hope that the £4 billion wiped off technology share prices last week was an aberration. And hope, too, that their company doesn't suddenly decide that things look better in Asia than Ireland, and relocate (although this might then give them time to spend the well-earned loot).
Maybe, in many ways, it was always like this. People who want to get to the top and earn as much money as they can always worked long hours and sacrificed friendships and, sometimes, family to do it. I can't imagine that Henry Ford spent a lot of his day worrying about quality time with the rest of the Fords: I guess having provided the lifestyle he'd have thought he'd done his bit.
But now we're supposed to be all things to everyone. Both men and women are supposed to be in touch with their feelings, there for the children, hard-nosed opportunists and available to the company night or day. We're supposed to have designer homes with this year's car in the cobble-locked driveway and last year's model in the garage.
We could, in theory, take our two-week holiday in the Maldives but we don't have time because there's a deal going down that we simply have to oversee or at least take the credit for, which won't happen if we're lazing on a sun-bed with a pina colada in one hand, even if the mobile phone is in the other.
I read an article about sleep deprivation a while ago. It turns out that getting by on five hours a night, which I used to, was pathetically inadequate. Since my lifestyle change I'm now racking up around seven, which means I'm getting an extra night's sleep per week. I knew that I was tired by Fridays but I didn't think I could have been that tired.
I can't help wondering if there's a whole phalanx of people out there working 12-hour days (excluding commuting time) and currently getting five hours' shut-eye per night who would actually work better if they were getting more sleep. In our drive to work harder, longer and more efficiently, are we actually going in the wrong direction completely?
Or is it just the latest lifestyle thing?
Vincent Browne is on leave
sheilaof@iol.ie