When I was a student in the late seventies, we rented a snazzy new push-button TV. Our remote control was a 10-foot stick.
Edited — ah, I see we weren’t the only ones to employ the latest technology at the time.
You seem to have as much understanding of working life in the pre-tech/digitised age as many oldies have of how things are now. As someone who worked in the corporate world until very recently, I experienced both — and both were shitty, dehumanising experiences, albeit in different ways...