What sort of person chose a career in computing in the mid-1960s? Well among other things, it seems, the sort of person who'd keep records like this. I think, from what's on some of the surrounding pages in this notebook, that the reason my dad did this, was to check the calculations of his tax and hopefully get a tax refund. Although I think he enjoyed this sort of activity, I can also imagine him thinking "one day we'll have machines to do all of this for us!"
I'm not sure why he went from a monthly figure to a weekly figure at the end of October. And I can't tell whether this was all done in one go, or whether he filled it in as he went, but I think that would mean more variation between the handwriting in the entries. We'll never really know.
I was born in the middle of this year, so I see that his weekly take-home pay was a whopping £13 1s 3d when I came squealing into the world. And although the benefit known as Family Allowance added 8 shillings a week to the household income, there was no maternity pay for my mother after she gave up work to have me. This wasn't as poverty stricken as it might sound though, as the average weekly wage for men was just over £16.
Some people just like tracking their money. I used to use Quicken for a while, but decided I didn't really need to. I've been fortunate to not have to watch every penny. These days a lot of people live off credit and that can catch up with you. I try to avoid that
Yeah, I can only just imagine what it was like when there weren't even calculators to do this. Let alone the weird 240 pennies to a pound arithmetic!
Everything they needed to calculate was harder back then. I'm glad I've only had to write software for metric.
My dad was an accountant and although he passed back in 2006, I still have a big box of all his papers. He and my mum divorced in the early 80's and he had to bring two children up on his own and this looks very familiar. He was some kind of accounting sadist!
This sort of thing sings pure dedication to me 😂
My dad was a data clerk at this point, that's what it says on my birth certificate - his dad had been a "Sales Ledger Clerk" all through his career - it always tickled me that my grandad felt it important to make the distinction between working on the sales ledger rather than purchasing :)
Anyway it was doing this job and feeding the mainframe that got my dad interested in computing - he left this job and became a trainee at the Austin Motor Company where he learned the basics of programming, which then led to him working as a programmer, writing accounting software, for the next twenty years. I don't know about your dad, but mine found some comfort in being able to express the world in numbers, giving him a bit of control over the chaos that was elswhere!