A banker, a customs broker and a real estate agent share “analog” memories
Over the summer, we’ve been sharing stories about how technology has changed people’s jobs in a series called “My Analog Life,”. We’ve heard from photographers, architects, a DJ and even a harpist.
To wrap up this series — for now — we checked in with three returning “Marketplace” guests about their own memories of work in the analog age.
Gretchen Blough, customs broker in Erie, Pennsylvania
When Gretchen Blough started working in customs brokerage about 11 years ago, fax machines were a regular part of her job, especially when she had to send over documents to a port.
“We’d have to print out the file, then we’d have to scan it into the fax and then send the fax,” Blough said. “So it was a little bit cumbersome.”
Nowadays, just about everything is handled online. “We always ask people to email the documents or we will email the documents to them,” Blough said. “And we don’t have a dedicated fax machine anymore.”
Mindy Palmer, a real estate agent in Missoula, Montana
Mindy Palmer, who began her real estate career in 1998, remembers taking photos of houses with disposable cameras on behalf of clients.
“The internet was still in its infant stages,” she said. “People weren’t constantly surfing real estate websites.”
She said billboards and print advertising were important when she was building her career. “The way we did it back then was consistency,” she said. But today, Palmer said, new agents try to build reputations as real estate influencers on social media. “I am so happy to be on this end of my career,” she said.
Laurie Stewart, CEO and president of Sound Community Bank in Seattle
“There’s only about one constant over the years, and that’s that there’s still money, cash money, involved,” said Laurie Stewart, who entered the banking industry as a teller when she was a freshman at the University of Washington in 1968.
Much of her job then was updating customer passbooks and bank ledger cards in a posting machine. Since then, nearly all of a teller’s duties have been automated or digitized. “We don’t even clear checks now,” she said. “We just send an electronic image.”
Stewart, now the president and CEO of Sound Community Bank in Seattle, isn’t misty-eyed about the posting machine or encoding the bottoms of checks for processing. “I don’t miss any of that other stuff,” she said. “I do miss those customer interactions.”
Click the audio player above to hear their stories.