Consider typing pools—er, centralized word-processing operations. If not passé, they at least deserve to be; most, anyway. Employees’ salaries keep rising, even with slowed-down inflation, while the price of computers is falling. By the end of this decade an average worker’s salary may exceed $20,000 annually. And yet micros and dedicated word processors will easily cost less than several thousand dollars. Even now, for a typical business, Barry says, centralized word processing simply doesn’t pay; it tears the employee away from his or her boss and harms the managers’ own work. Executives must vie with other offices of a company for the word processors’ time. They can’t effortlessly set their own priorities. And quality is more of a problem, too, because, as Barry notes, “someone in centralized word processing won’t normally get hell for not catching an error. I expect my secretary to challenge anything she’s not certain about. For instance, my secretary will come in and say, ‘You left such-and-such person off the list of people receiving the memo.’ Which matters. Often who a memo goes to matters as much as what’s in the memo.”

And what about the question of knowing which calls to put through to the boss? Around the time Barry and I talked, he was obsessed with a paper projecting the World Bank’s office needs for the next twenty-five years. He didn’t have to tell his secretary of the importance of any call about the paper. She knew. For she’d been helping him put it together.

“It isn’t a question anymore of the efficient use of the machines,” Barry says in recommending the traditional secretary over the pool arrangement. “It’s effective use of the people. It’s like the phone. Even if people use the phone just twice a day for business, we still give them their own. We don’t put all the phones in one room, do we?”

You may disagree with Barry and still insist that central word processing is the most efficient use of both equipment and people; and maybe your company’s size, economics, or policy will allow nothing else. But if so, be prepared for more job complaints. Shut off from the outside world, perhaps in a windowless, poorly ventilated room, the pool members may feel like Dickensian factory hands. And the claustrophobia may not just be physical. With no one around but others in drudge jobs and their immediate supervisors, the workers feel cut off from chances for advancement. They become obsessed with their immediate surroundings and may be more apt to notice shortcomings of their equipment. “You look at studies of typing pools,” says Waters, “and you’ll find they may actually get in the way of productivity. More workers hate their jobs, and they’re more likely to dislike their equipment, feel backaches, other pains.” He says that sick leave, deservedly or not, may increase.

A gray-haired word processor in Manhattan said she disliked even “clusters,” which were smaller and presumably more pleasant than a giant typing pool in a back room. She missed the “pretty cozy relationship” she enjoyed as secretary to one executive.[[35]]

“He might send me uptown to return a blouse that didn’t fit his wife. So he couldn’t very well tell me not to make personal calls. Not that I stayed on the phone all day. My job was to get his work out, which included staying late if I had to. He appreciated me. And I expected to stay with him till he retired.”

Responding to consultants’ recommendations, however, her company one day offered her three choices. She could work as a mere administrative assistant, join a word-processing operation, or quit. So she forsook the familiar typewriter for a Wang. “Ah,” she reflected, “when I think of those years of correction tape, white-out, retyping!”

Then, continuing her remarks to writer Barbara Garson, she added: “I want you to take this down: I love my Wang. It’s not the machine that gave me the shaft.”

What, then, did?

“Straight typing, seven hours a day,” said the word processor. “That’s the shaft.”