We’ve seen in the wee hours of the morning cars go down our street and toss newspapers wrapped in sealed plastic bags onto a few folks driveways. I assume these folks subscribe on-line and some poor minimum wage driver goes all over town tossing papers out their window.
I’m a retired legal secretary. I like to look at indeed.com now and then, because I fully expect to see my old job disappear eventually. So far, though, I still see a few openings around Silicon Valley.
I ran a one-hour photo lab in a CVS store for a few years in the late 90s. I know there are still one-hour photo places around but they’re much fewer and further between now.
My stepmom was a legal secretary in the 70s. Isn’t that the same thing as what’s now called a paralegal?
Yeah, I don’t know what the title currently is, but there’s certainly somebody in my lawyer’s office who answers the phone and deals with paperwork and makes appointments and contacts clients to tell them that something’s ready for them to come in and sign. It’s a one lawyer office, but I’d be surprised if multi-lawyer offices don’t have at least one and for large ones probably multiple people doing that work. These days the people doing it may also do work requiring additional training and certificates therefore.
The jobs are separate, but there’s overlap - each can do a bit of the other’s job. A paralegal has to have more training, and perhaps a four year degree. I was able to do some of the tasks that a paralegal usually did, and a paralegal could of course prepare FedEx packages, tab documents for signature, and scan or file paperwork. But generally they’re not the same thing.
Gad, I’m glad I’m done with that. Scanning documents into the system was supposed to take the place of filing and paperwork, but in reality, it just added more work. The attorneys still wanted their paper files, so we maintained the ever-increasing mountains of paper files AND had to scan everything as well. Piles and piles and piles of it, day in and day out.
Dang, this whole thread is making me sad.
I’ve never held a job that doesn’t exist anymore but I’ve held jobs that involved central tasks that no longer exist in the same form.
I was a cashier for a handful of businesses as a high school part-timer in the 70s. It involved ringing up the price of the items being purchased, one at a time, by entering the dollar and cents values on a mechanical cash register’s keyboard. The keyboard had a single cents row (0-9 keys), a tens of cents row (0-9 again), a dollars row (same), tens of dollars (likewise), and hundreds of dollars (yep once again). It had the capacity for higher multiples but the pharmacist I worked for had disabled those. It did add up multiple purchases for us, so a pack of cigarettes (50¢) — New Entry a candy bar (20¢) — Total ==> $0.70. We were to compute the tax and enter it then Total once again, speak the total to the customer, receive their cash (credit cards and checks were rare), and make the change. Mechanical cash register would accept Amt Tendered but we were to independently count change back, from the bottom up: "That’s 75 " (hands them a nickel), “a dollar” (hands them a quarter) “two three four five, have a good day sir” (hands four $1 bills).
Obviously there are still cashiers but with scanners and automatic change-makers it’s kind of a different process.
Uh, Model 28 ASR and KSR.
Admittedly I did only the most rudimentary repairs on them. The guys trained on them worked M-F daytimes and there were several spares you could swap out in their off hours. If my scheduled maintenance was done and it was obvious what was broken, usually a broken phenolic gear, I’d take a stab at replacing it. Otherwise it would wait until Monday.
In addition to the painting, I was in grad school when it all went from hand drafting set designs to it being on computer. They were still teaching drafting in my first year, there was none by the time I finished. A lost art.
Well, that’s a detail shop. I’m not sure I’ve seen a plain old car wash that had employees washing and drying by hand in a very long time. My job was to climb inside as the car was moving through the wash line and to clean the insides of the windows and wipe down the upholstery. On a busy day it was hard to keep up, especially when you got a “missed a spot” customer.
I don’t know what you’re “Uh-ing” about. The Model 28 Teletype was introduced in 1953, the Model 33 (ASR and KSR versions) came ten years later. The ASR 33 Teletype was almost universally used as the console of the DEC minicomputers I worked with at the time and is a wonderfully nostalgic memory from my youth. The ASR 35 was sometimes used with larger computers like the DEC PDP-10. I’ve never even seen a Model 28.
Just Old Fart bragging about whipper-snappers and their new-fangled innovations they think is the bomb.
I still get a paper delivered, and that’s how I get it. The paper used to always be there by 7am, but they changed drivers and now it sometimes doesn’t get delivered until 9am. Occasionally I’ve gone out to check on it just in time to have the driver hand it to me instead of throwing it on my driveway.
Had an old KSR 33. Used it to read punched tape and maybe once or twice to punch something. The ribbon mechanism broke but it came with 4 rolls of 2 part paper with carbon paper. I could print on it and read the carbon copy. Had a very old manual for some much earlier version, was no help in repairing the ribbon.
If it had a paper tape reader and punch, it must have been an ASR-33 (Automatic Send-Receive). The KSR (Keyboard Send-Receive) had no paper tape device.
You are correct I’m sure. Sorry about that. Been a long time. Got rid of that and a lot of other old junk by 1990. Couple of things I wish I kept like a large Variac®. When I moved here in 97 I got rid of the junk collectors treasure trove of explosion proof mining lamps from a lighting study. One disk drive in a half rack is a wheeled workbench now. I managed to sell the rest of the insides to a place looking for parts.
Not sure if these are completely gone or not. One was selling (or attempting to sell) Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Another was as a projectionist in a cinema where we had to mount and change the reels of film and look after the carbon arc light. My first real job was as a COBOL programmer but I’m fairly sure there are some of those still around.
Oh yes. I’ve worked behind a non-electronic cash register, too. Many of us old farts still know how to count change that way.
Who here has dealt with a young checker-outer and facilitated their calculating change by handing them an extra nickel or penny and had them stare at you blankly?
In all fairness, I almost never pay with cash anymore, even for the smallest transactions.
Both the job and the place don’t exist anymore: I was a busboy in the Silver Dollar Saloon at Frontier Village.
