Breaking New Ground—Stories from Defence Construction Breaking_new_ground | Page 64

Franca Milito was hired by DCL in 1977
following her graduation from high school.
She continues to work at Head Office in
Ottawa as an accountant in the Finance
Department.
DCL was also making strides in the realm of technology. In 1975 and 1977,
Rita Caminiti and Franca Milito from the High School of Commerce were
hired on in the Finance Department at Head Office. Both remain with DCC,
Rita as a system support analyst with the IT team and Franca as an accountant.
They both clearly remember how technology has changed their jobs—when
they started, typing and payroll cheque production used carbon paper to
create permanent copies of documents, while accounting was handled with
the aid of a Burroughs Machine.
Franca:
We used to have mail delivered by the mail boys, and they used to have to
take the hand deliveries to National Defence personally on the bus. They
had this stainless steel briefcase for all the mail—they looked kind of like
Inspector Gadget. They actually came to pick up your mail at the desk, so
you got to see and talk to them. We’ve lost a lot of that face-to-face contact.
We don’t even make as many phone calls as we used to, because e-mail
has replaced that.
Rita Caminiti was hired two years before
Franca Milito and now works as a system
support analyst with the Information
Services team.
When I came in there was this huge accounting machine that looked like a
calculator on legs with tons of buttons. It was quite the structure—it was
bigger than a table, (and) it was kind of intimidating. You used to post all the
accounts, any transactions, using this machine onto cards.
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BREAKING NEW GROUND
DEFENCE CONSTRUCTION CANADA