What Security Issues?

So between what I was doing badly and what my employer the chemist was doing badly, I was soon told to stop working there.  It was funny, thinking back, as there, I had been given prescription drugs to deliver by bicycle, riding around the suburb, often until dark. A very young cyclist, known in the local area to be doing the local drug deliveries, carrying unknown types of drugs. Delivering to unknown addresses. Not an issue I suppose. But could you imagine that happening today? Back then of course, it had been a little different, compared to one of my other jobs such as a telegram delivery boy.
At the young age of around 14, I think it was. There we would report to the office of the telex machines at the post office. Not faxes, or email. There was no direct connection to computers, lets be honest here, for those that don’t think about history. There were no home computers. And home computers, that were integrated (Computer Telephony Integration - CTI) to the telephone system? Well, that didn’t happen till mid 1980’s (makes me sound old doesn’t it, but it really isn’t that long ago). While the telephone was the only quick form of verbal communication, even then, people needed to be informed, or have official confirmation of some things, even faster. If it was a business matter (international contract information, etc), the actual printout from the telex may be required to be delivered to the company.
Then it was put into an envelope passed to the ‘delivery boy’ (we were never called anything as glamorous as ‘bike couriers’, that name didn’t come in till years later), who ‘hot footed’ it to the required address. Now ‘Hot footed’ that’s a great term that came about in one of two ways. Myth has it, there was an native cure which involved hot paste on the soles of the feet to free the bad spirits, and the other, was the setting alight of the shoe laces of a visiting dandy, who while jumping about trying to put out the flames, would be so embarrassed, they would then leave town quickly. Whatever, it implied immediate departure.  And depart rapidly we did. Then, onto our bike, through the traffic to the required address. In Dunedin, that meant riding up and down a few hills and crowded streets. But telegrams were the fastest way to get written information from one place to the other. I brought this up to refer to a similar situation to the Chemist job. It was not unknown for the telegram delivery boys to be given very large blank checks to deliver around town. Hospital wages checks or such. And they were blank, just a value written on the check. I recall once being handed an envelope containing a blank check for 128,000 dollars and told to race it to the ANZ bank before 4pm through town. Frightening really. The uninformed responsibility that people would thrust on a young person without thinking of the security risks.
(Continued tomorrow)