Discourse has just informed me that there have been at least two threads on this topic in the past, one in 2014 and one in 2015. I say it’s time for another.
Please say how long ago this was-- or at least the mention decade. I’ll go first. One of my very first summer jobs when I was still in high school was telephone answering service operator. This was the late 1960s.
This was before voicemail and before standalone answering machines. I sat at a switchboard in a room full of switchboards staffed by women. On each board there were 40-50 incoming lines that belonged to businesses of all kinds. When a line rang, I answered with the name of the business and took very detailed messages. I passed them on to the office staff on one of five incoming lines when they called in after opening in the morning or when they returned from lunch. Each business had its own quirks and rules about what you could say or not say to customers. And our boss had plenty of rules, too. One of them was that we were not allowed to say the phrase, “I don’t know.” We could say, “I haven’t been told,” “I’ll ask Mr. So-and-so to let you know,” “I don’t have that information” or some variation. We also were NEVER allowed to say the words, “I’ll have <whoever> call you back.” That was a hangin’ offense. We could never offer promises or assurances. It was challenging and nerve-wracking, and you had to be on your toes. Our supervisor could be listening in on any call without notice, and we’d get a “mod note” (as it were) if we messed up. I can’t believe I could do that as a teenager. But I must have been good because after a few months, they had me training new people. One of the most irksome things about the job was that you were tethered to your switchboard by your headset cord and could not step away for any reason unless someone relieved you.
Another example: my mother, who was born in 1924, worked as an elevator operator. Some of the senior citizens here may remember a time when elevators in office buildings were staffed by a man or woman who opened and closed the grid-like door and “drove” the elevator from floor to floor.
I know lots of techy jobs are obsolete, like keypunch operators who punched thousands of cards and then verified them by running the same cards back through the machine and punching them again.
In the early 1980s i was a “Computer Operator” !
(No punched cards, but equally obsolete large magnetic tapes.)
Every 2 weeks, we had to print invoices for stockbroker clients. It took
over 12 hours !
I was a Saturday morning PBX operator for a small company in Baltimore in the early 70s. In the summer, among other tasks, I made copies with a mimeograph machine and printed out bills of lading on a machine that read punched tapes.
This was my first real job after college at a printshop. Exacto knife, waxer, IBM composer. The tip of one finger always had tiny cuts from wiping wax off the Exacto knife blade.
I did that as part of a graphics arts position until PCs changed that whole field. I miss the smell of the waxer (and later, the darkroom chemicals).
In college I spent a couple summers as a Kelly Girl and one job I had was for TRW Inc., which was an automotive and aerospace company. I filled in for their PBX operator (they had an AT&T Dimension system) and also monitored incoming telexes and teletypes.
There were also some data entry and filing jobs that might still exist, but would be done very differently today.
I only remember elevator operators at the nicer department stores downtown when I was a kid. We only went down there during the holidays so it was a big deal to go and I still remember a lot about it.
I also built and ran a chain of drive-thru photo kiosks (think Fotomat.) We also had a courier service that ran supplies and developed photos to accounts from Brea to Needles, Temecula to Barstow and everywhere in-between. Digital photography killed that deader than Rudi’s law degree.
Beveling crystals that went into, IIRC, radio sets. Mid 1970’s.
You sat at a station and scooped up, on the end of a sticklike thing, a small round disc; and held it against a grinder in such a fashion as to get a nice even bevel all around the outside. You needed to get the right amount of bevel, not too much, not too little, not too uneven – and they expected you to do it fast; I don’t remember how many per hour, but it was a lot.
Paid minimum wage, and gave you back aches. (Ergonomic work places didn’t exist yet; or if they did, neither the company nor I had heard of such a thing.) I lasted, IIRC, about three months – and found out later that most people didn’t last anywhere near that long, and furthermore that in most cases they rotated the job with some others at the place that were less back achey, but they had me doing just that because I didn’t know to demand rotation.
I presume that job is now obsolete. I haven’t tried to investigate when it died.
(And no, I don’t remember the names of anyone I worked with there; though I remember enjoying talking with one person at lunch, until he told me we had to stop doing that because it was causing gossip that we were having sex – a theory based entirely on the grounds that one of us was male, the other one was female, and we were talking to each other when not required to by the job.)
I used to make presentations. It required a dedicated computer with special software. I’d create slides with bullet points. These were actual slides, using film. We’d create the slides, send them to a camera, and use that to shoot on film. Then it’d go into a processor. After they were done (about 45 minutes), we’d put them in slide mounts to deliver them to the customer to put in their Kodak carousels.
I needed to use a digitizer to create some of the graphics. Curves were extremely difficult; it took me weeks to create the General Electric logo when they changed it in 1987.**
Once PowerPoint was ubiquitous, no one needed our services. The company went out of business (I’d left by then).
When I was in HS, I was a soda jerk in a drugstore, early 50s. By 55, virtually all drugstores had gotten out of that business.
From 1955-57 I was the operator of what was described as the largest electronic analog computer ever built. I do not know what metric was being used, but even then other people were writing software to solve the same set of problems on the Univac I, one of the very first (maybe the very first) digital computers, built entirely with vacuum tubes and featuring a 1 farad capacitor (actually a room filled with 2000 electrolytic capacitors each 500 mf).
I remember as a kid getting a tour of a university computing facility, and one of the things they had way in some back room was a fairly large analog computer taking up pretty much the whole room. Even then it was considered obsolete and was used little if at all, but what I particularly remember is that it looked like a classic computer in an old horror movie – or possibly just the set designer’s idea of “complicated scientific equipment” – because it had dials and gauges all over the place – just covered with them. Even the largest digital computers didn’t have any of that stuff, although back then they all had an impressive array of blinking lights and switches.
I strongly suspect that the first job I had after graduating from college no longer exists. In the late 70s I worked for a Coca-Cola bottling plant taking the information from the individual drivers’ sales/delivery reports and coding them so they could be input into the computer, and then reconciling the summarized reports generated by the computer. I’m sure now this is done with laptops/pads which the drivers carry while on their routes.
My first full-time job in my youth back in the 70s I guess is technically obsolete now. Theoretically half my time was spent managing a departmental computer facility that contained several minicomputers (various DEC PDPs), basically a small data center. The other half was subsidized by research grants that covered the software I wrote for various research projects to run on those systems.
Today there are no minicomputers in that sense (I’m not counting servers). Today such researchers would typically be using PCs which are far more powerful than even the largest DEC PDP-10 was in those days, and their software needs would largely be met by off-the-shelf “apps”. So my old job literally doesn’t exist any more because the answer to who my successor is today in that long-ago job is “no one”.
I was a “runner” for Olan Mills Portrait Studios. When the local telemarketers made a sale I would be dispatched to the customer’s house to deliver the package coupon and collect payment. (The idea was to get to them before they could change their minds) Put a lot of miles on my VW Bug driving all over the Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Mountain View area.
I did that sort of thing working on my college student newspaper around 1987-8, my junior and senior years. We used what I think was a phototypesetting machine to paste the long columns of text, headlines and photos onto the pages, which were then sent to the printers.
The student newspaper was profitable enough based on advertising that it received no subsidy from the student union.
Seems like several newspaper jobs listed here. I have an additional one that I doubt is done much any more: I hand inserted ads into papers. I did this for two different newspapers. One was a larger paper that had a machine inserter but still required some hand insertion. I then worked for a small paper that only did hand insertion.
