Progression

After posting last night I was thinking about how things have changed over the last 30 years.  When I began working at Forestbrooke Apartments I worked in the front office for the manager of the community. 

I had an IBM Selectric typewriter.  My kids have never seen one of those puppies.  It had a ribbon and correction ribbon too.  When you typed something with carbon paper in between the pages the correction ribbon was worthless.  Oh my goodness that has much improved.  Do they even sell carbon paper anymore. 

Every apartment community keeps a rent roll of some sort.  I had a paper rent roll that I copied each month.  I didn't dare use the master copy.  Each month before printing I would take my liquid white out and change any units where there had been move-outs / move-ins / transfers / rent changes etc.  Today I click generate and the rent roll prints.  I guess you had to do a new master at some point because it became so "gunked up" from the white out.  I don't even own a bottle of liquid white out.

I spent a lot of time writing work orders.  It too was a manual system. The back of the form had carbon on it that you lined up on a master sheet and you had to write all the info needed all on one line.  (Twitter practice perhaps)   If you wanted to know the history of maintenance issues in a particular unit, the completed work orders were put in a file for each unit.  Admittedly there was always a stack waiting to get filed.  It was a lower priority task.  Now I can print a report of maintenance issues, track where new appliances go, etc.  However the info is only as good as what is entered.

After the first Friday was completed I was driving in my 1967 Plymouth Valiant probably to Farmville or Lynchburg.  I was quizzing myself on who was in what apartment.  101 - Sunshine VanHorn, 102 - Ed Brooks and on and on.  It wasn't long before I could go all the way through all 94 units in the Charlevoix building.   Crazy but true.

And I was earning $4.50 per hour. 

When we got our first office computer in probably 1986 it had a 10 megabyte hard drive.  Just think about that for a minute.  Our current computers have 1 terabyte of hard drive.

And I can access all the properties from a single computer because the software that drives the office is internet based.  Nice option compared to the days of dialing into a computer via PCAnywhere to fix an issue or the last day of the month being download day when the database from each site was downloaded to the main office.  But that was the 90's.