20 jobs that have disappeared

[Liberal_in_LA]

Can you guess some of the jobs that have disappeared without looking at the list?

Two that vanished in my memory: Typing pool and elevator operator. When I entered the workforce in the 80s our office had a 24 hour typing pool. You'd submit a handwritten draft at the end of the day, by morning it would be ready. In the late 70s, there were some old downtown buildings with elevator operator. If you watch 'Celebrity apprentice', Trump has a white gloved elevator guy.

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The advancement of technology, and the changes in our society, have made a number of jobs obsolete. Automation has made it possible for machines to do the jobs humans once did – and do them faster. As a result, it's little surprise that some jobs are in decline and others have disappeared altogether. Here are 20 jobs that have disappeared over the decades.

Lector

In New York City and Florida, cigar makers often became bored. They hired lectors to read to them while they worked. Lectors could read just about any material requested, and were paid using pooled wages of the workers. Lectors were placed in a chair on a raised platform so that most of the workers could hear.

Copy Boy

Errand runners used to take paper from desk to desk in newspaper offices around the country. When reports came out of teletype machines from the news wire services, copy boys would take the mimeographed information, sort it and then deliver it. Then, when a story was done, the copy boys could collect the article and take it to an editor. Now it’s all done via document sharing and e-mail.

Log Driver


In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the easiest way to move logs over long distances was to send them down the river. Log drivers were needed to guide the logs down river. Men moved ahead of the logs to remove obstructions, while others remained behind to free stuck logs. Because they did such dangerous work, log drivers were paid a much higher salary than those that cut down the trees.


more at the link
http://www.mainstreet.com/article/career/employment/20-jobs-have-disappeared?page=1

[greatauntoftriplets]

1. Very interesting....

Chicago still has one bowling alley with human pinsetters and one elevator operator still at work. Other than that, those are all long-gone occupations.

[Sanity Claws]

2. Typing pool lives on as wordprocessing

I haven't worked in a law firm in about four years but the large firms had word processing departments. The word processors usually handled the bigger typing jobs like briefs. The secretaries usually did the short letters, handled scheduling, etc.

[XemaSab]

30. Word processing is mostly formatting

It seems to me to be a fairly specialized skill, moreso than typing.

[csziggy]

3. Sponge diving still is an occupations - though mostly as a tourist attaction

In Tarpon Springs, Florida, north of Tampa. http://www.spongedocks.net/

It is also a center of Greek culture in Florida and a really neat place to visit.

Back in the 80s a friend worked her way through college as a switchboard operator. Towards the end, the building added a moving message marquee and when she turned out to be good at programming that, they gave her a chance at other computerized tasks around the building, which extended her job past when they phased out the switchboard.

[safeinOhio]

4. In the 60s I was

an encyclopedia door to door sales man for a short time, like 2 weeks. I actually made some pretty good money the first week. The second week the company skipped town and I didn't get paid.

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. My parents still have our 1950s era encyclopedia. Everyone had 'em

[NM_hemilover]

6. political climate of today, I'd say news reporting disappeared

[IDemo]

7. Cord board telephone operator

Been there, done that. :hi:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vI0RnBDDwQo/RsBH8UuedUI/AAAAAAAAAaM/iQGn76BMMv0/s320/telephone+operator.jpg

[blueknight]

9. my mother, rest her soul

was a switchboard operator 38 years

[SharonAnn]

23. Me too! Me too!

[givemebackmycountry]

32. My grandmother did that for years in New York City...

At Wickersham General Hospital in Manhattan.
I remember sitting in her lap as she deftly plugged and unplugged callers.
I was like 3 years old and it was the 50's.

Guess what industry I've worked in for the past 30 years?
That's right...
"My son works for the phone company" my 78 year old Mom will tell you.

[lpbk2713]

34. No need to tell you ...

that's where the terms Tip & Ring came from.

I've worked on a few cord boards myself.


:thumbsup: :hi: :thumbsup:

[IDemo]

35. I was only there a couple of years

I also did a couple of years in directory assistance, using a microfiche reader.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

8. buggy whip maker

[riderinthestorm]

12. There's actually a thriving whip business still out there.

They may not all be used for buggies (heh), but the horse industry (S & M, bondage crowd?!) certainly requires a LOT of whips.

I personally own my fair share.

[miscsoc]

17. so are you into horses or bondage?

either is cool, just curious :)

[riderinthestorm]

29. Horses. Dressage and combined training but we also drive my daughter's (outgrown) pony

so we really do own a buggy whip as well. The pony is a Shetland/Welsh cross who should live for another 30 years+ and since she lives on air (virtually no feed), (barefoot) without shoes, and is darling, we've taught her to drive while awaiting grandchildren and keeping her in reserve for fun future stuff.

So dressage whips, jumping bats, buggy whips... you name it, we've got it. TMI perhaps but the only time I've ever handled a bullwhip was rounding up a herd of horses that had been winter pasturing in the Blue Mountains of Australia....

As far as using them intimately in the bedroom, well... :evilgrin:

OT, I have to admit, when I watch movies like "Mr. and Mrs Smith", where there actually are bondage scenes, it's pretty obvious to spot those who have handled whips, and those who don't. Angelina Jolie obviously does not handle them on a regular basis FWIW....

[Kat45]

10. Interesting article.

I hadn't thought of a lot of those jobs in years. Some of them, I'd never heard of.

[Brickbat]

11. Fireman and brakeman on the railroad. Cabooses are gone, too.

Some crews still have a brakeman.

[Canuckistanian]

13. Ethics Professor at Liberty U.

Completely redundant.

[ZeitgeistObserver]

14. My gawd, these are really old jobs.

[KillCapitalism]

37. I agree there

I'm 34 and have never heard of more than half of the jobs listed.

[ZeitgeistObserver]

51. I remember a couple from my childhood,

like a milkman and an elevator operator, but the rest I've only ssen in movies. Or heard about from my parents.

[Canuckistanian]

15. I remember Ice Cutters

When I was a kid in the summertime, we used to go to an "Ice House" to get ice for our coolers. It was a barn-like structure and you chose your block of ice from under a pile of sawdust.

I later learned that those ice blocks were cut by hand from the lake (Georgian Bay) in winter and stored in the ice house all year long under sawdust. I thought it was amazing that ice could last that long, but it did.

[Brickbat]

21. Mr. Brickbat volunteered as an ice cutter in 2004 to help build an ice palace for the Winter

Carnival in St. Paul, Minn.

http://www.monsterchef.net/2004IcePalace2/2004IcePalace3.htm

[Canuckistanian]

31. Wow, that's beautiful

I knew an ice sculptor here in Ottawa. But he did nothing on that scale.

[Brickbat]

46. It was really a neat project to be involved with. The carnival worked with the union building trades

to cut, haul, stack and build with the ice. It was a wonderful project and as you can see was just gorgeous.

[miscsoc]

16. I like the sound of Lectoring

I suppose you could still have them today, in the form of professional workplace raconteurs. Would be a good job creation thingy for out of work stand up comics, although radios and televisions obv. negate the need for professional readers.

[annabanana]

43. It sounds like a dream job to me.

I'm telling you... I read aloud great.

[Cresent City Kid]

18. I used to have one that's disappearing

I used to be a stripper, not what you're thinking. I work in printing, an I used to arrange film to be burned on printing plates, called stripping. I watched as computers took over for cameras for making the film, then eventually they took over my job, burning the plates directly.

I now work the computers that do this, but I know longer have to put Occupation: "stripper" on my tax form.

[rug]

45. Me too. And Phototypositor operator.

[REP]

49. Called it a headliner, but I used to work on one of those!

I've worked on Linotype Hell, Compugraphic CompSet and EPICS (and a few others).

[Scout]

47. book compositor here

my job disappeared with "desktop publishing" ... and i had to teach our new customers to do MY job on (at the time) inferior software/equipment.

i saw exactly what you described happen to the compositors and book printers.

[REP]

19. I knew typesetter would be in there - I used to be one

Hot and cold typesetters have been replaced by desktop, which hasn't caught up yet (the programs and the operators).

[kskiska]

22. I was a typesetter and paste-up artist

I had to learn to be a "graphic artist," which isn't quite the same thing. Now we're expected to be designer/typesetter/illustrator/copywriter/layout artist/photographer-stat-room-guy-gal/paste-up artist/proofreader all in one. There used to be a person to each of these jobs, and they did them better than they're done today.

[Cresent City Kid]

25. Computers created a glut of amatuers

I get work all day long from "designer" that don't know basic measurment, let alone printing.

[Scout]

48. been there, done that. i had to try to teach those "designers" how to set up

their files for digital output.

just wanted to fucking strangle some of them. many did want to learn, but some.... :grr:

[REP]

50. No shit

Kerning? Tracking? Whuh?

I won a Zapf back in the day for my work on books.

[Whisp]

24. not too many strippers around anymore either - negative strippers in print shops. nt

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

40. I got this mental image of a stripper ranting about how existence is senseless as she undresses.

[-..__...]

20. As recently as 26 - 27 years ago...

I worked for a major record chain that had one multi-story (5-6 floors, the top 2-3 were for warehousing/storage), outlet in downtown Boston.

It had an old style elevator with the sliding accordion grates and up-down-stop lever.

There was no elevator operator occupation per-say, but all the employees were trained in its use and operation and drawing elevator duty
was as routine and part of the job as being a cashier or stock person.

[Silent3]

42. Tower Records? n/t

[-..__...]

54. Much earler than that.

It was Strawberries in Downtown Crossing.

Tower Records didn't have a store in Boston until a few years after I left Strawberries because the chains owner (Morris Levy), had a business arrangement with Tower where neither one would open shop in the others territory.

The deal went out the window when Levy died.

Levy was an interesting character, btw... see links below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Levy

http://www.rockabilly.nl/references/messages/morris_levy.htm

[Fuzz]

26. Dey took our jobs!!!!

[XemaSab]

27. I think it's fascinating how much things have changed in my lifetime

When I was little my mom worked for a financial company in the Bay Area, and a few times a year we would have to go to the printer and spend the night there.

This was the mid-80s, and there were men literally setting the type for these 300-page documents by hand.

The company is still in business, surprisingly, but they do communications (in the broader sense) now.

[marybourg]

28. In this era of bar-code readers, I wonder if there are still

crews of inventory-takers who go in to supermarkets several times a year.

[iris27]

33. Yes - although I'd guess the teams are smaller.

The college bookstore I work for hires a company called RGIS to do our yearly inventory - we get a team of about 10 people with barcode scanners and they cover the entire store (big enough to employ 40 people) in half a day. We just do test counts behind them. From chatting with them, they also do grocery stores and Wal-marts in the area.

[starroute]

36. I remember a bunch of those

When I started kindergarten in 1951, there were still street sweepers -- old men with brooms and barrows who'd be going around and sweeping between the cars while I was waiting for the school bus. Then about 1953 or 1954, they put in alternative side of the street parking so the machines could come through instead. I don't know what became of the old men -- I guess they lost their jobs.

And I remember the junkman going by with his horse-drawn wagon. And all the department stores still had elevator operators, and I always wondered how they knew how to get to the right floor with only a lever and no numbers.

I never heard of mimeograph operator as a job, though. Mimeographs were still used a lot by teachers and student organizations when I was in college, but you were always expected to do it yourself. In fact, the old typewriters generally had a little lever with three color settings -- black for the top of the ribbon, red for the bottom, and white to hold the ribbon out of the way entirely so you could cut mimeo stencils.

[SoCalDem]

38. Telephone operators..

In my small hometown many women supported families on that telephone operator salary. It was one of the higher paying jobs in town...and it was a job that was offered to men too, but most found it too "constricting" and boring, so women filled the Bell Telephone building

Until that opened, the only jobs available were part time dress shop sales ladies and clerks at the dime stores.

Most of the local businesses were small famliy-owned, so there were not many jobs available to women who just wanted a job.

there were motel maids & waitresses, but those were not the jobs people wanted.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

39. There were bowling alleys with pinsetters in Rio in the late 1990s.

Also, I saw a real linotypist in action at a small city newspaper in RJ state in the early 1980s.

[madamesilverspurs]

41. keypunch operator

We did the cards that required coining the phrase:

"Do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate".

Ah, good times.


-

[Silent3]

44. I never did it for a living...

...but while I was in high school I took some classes for things like COBOL and FORTRAN at a local community college. I got to experience the joy of writing software by punching cards for those classes. Especially fun was the time near the end of a semester when you'd have to wait an hour or two in line to feed your cards through the card reader, often to find out you'd made one or two stupid little mistakes, then have to repunch a few card and get back into the long line again.

[tonysam]

53. Yep. Did that when I first started working over 30 years ago.

IBM 129s, then the 3760s, then CRTS, and then I retrained for something else.

The 129s drove me nuts. If you made a mistake on a card, you knew it because another colleague would "verify" to make sure the cards were correct.

DDDDDDDD...or whatever the noise was. It pissed me off.

[underpants]

52. Do we still have typewriter repairmen?

Condi Rice is looking for another useless industry to devote her life to