I’m a librarian and haven’t seen a book stamped in over 30 years.
But this still exists. One of my lawyers uses an answering service as does my doctor. Therefore I’d guess that other businesses still use them too.
One summer job I had (15 years old, circa 1976) was working at a grocery store as a “Packing boy”. The cashier and I would bag the groceries and I’d pack them in the cart (all the carts were numbered). The customer would go out to their car while we did this, with a card that had the cart number. Then they’d drive up to front entrance and show their card. The packing boy would load the bags into the car, back seat, trunk, the “way way back” (station wagons), whatever, then take the customers card and cart back to the check out lane and do it again and again. You almost always got a tip, usually a quarter, sometimes more, sometimes less. IIRC the wage was $2.30 and I’d make another $3 an hour on tips. I was pulling over a hundred bucks a week. Do you know what $100 a week was to a 15 year old in 1976? At that time every grocery store had packing boys. I don’t know any grocery store that still has this today.
Another summer job I had (circa 1978 17 years old) was at a company that developed film. When you dropped your film off at a store it got picked up and taken to this company. The film was cracked open in a dark room and run through machines with smelly chemicals. This is why it took over a week to get your photos back. My job was to clean and maintain those machines and it sucked and the owner was a huge A-Hole. Now days many places have machines to develop your film right there at the store. No more need to send it out. Not that many people are using film any more. Or maybe they are. I don’t know.
In the early 1980s, when I was 15, my aunt “got me into” a work program at a national wildlife refuge. I was kind of excited- my twin sister had recently forged working papers to say that she was 16, not 15, and had gotten a cushy job at Wendy’s and was making money and acting cool and superior about it.
I showed up on my first day in the required work boots, long-sleeved shirt, and jeans, ready to identify trees and maybe man the gift shop. I entered a room full of similarly clad teenagers, kind of sketchy looking and rowdy, but whatever. I was there for it, or so I thought. So began the Summer of Agony- we spent three months chopping down trees to create fire trails, filling potholes with wheelbarrows full of gravel, and collecting trash in canoes on the Bass River. The jeans and long sleeved shirts were to deter (they didn’t) the killer greenheads and horseflies that snacked on us all day long. We had to wear hardhats as well, every day, the hottest summer on record in NJ in decades. Two unfortunate souls were whisked off to the hospital, never to be seen again, after trying to smoke something they had found in the woods, incorrectly identifying as weed. We had to lie in trenches in the ground, counting the deer that went by for 8 hours to establish some type of deer count that was used to monitor hunting. Our canoes, full of collected trash, would tip over, spilling the contents into the winding river as we floundered and sank in our work boots and jeans trying to gather it back up, seeing black snakes slither by. The fire trails- by far the worst. Chopping with axes all day long in the sweltering woods, barely making a dent, stopping for a 15 minute lunch. The day that program ended and we threw our laced together boots over the power lines was the happiest day of my life- truly.
A few years later it was revealed to me that the job my aunt had pulled strings to get me into was actually some type of summer work program for juvenile delinquents, hard physical labor to show us what we DIDN’T want to do with the rest of our lives, and where we were headed if we continued on our current paths. As with most programs of this nature, the intended effect was far from the reality- I met my future partying crew and we continued on our debauched paths together for quite a few raucous years.
Thankfully, yes, this program is now obsolete, although it has left me with countless stories and a kind of fun grudge against my aunt and my twin, the real juvenile delinquent, forger of working papers and catalyst for the shittiest summer of my life.
I love old computers, especially analog ones. Would you mind telling us about that one, and maybe a tale or two?
I’ve known people who do it and it’s much like was 40 years ago - they get x cents per paper , not an hourly rate. What people often do around here is deliver multiple papers - I subscribe to two and apparently the person who delivers them also delivers a third, because I’ve gotten that third paper by mistake.
In inland SoCal during that time period it likely would have been one of my drivers.
This was in southeastern Wisconsin.
So you know what I’m talking about.
Do such photo developing companies still exist anywhere?
Yes, lawyers and doctors practices still use answering services. We’ve all called the doctor’s number on the weekend and gotten the service. But when I did it it was hundreds of small businesses that now rely on voicemail. Or contact made through their website.
Similar, although gouache on paper.
Also - hand-digitizing geological field maps with a puck on a drawing-board-sized digitizer. Nowadays they just seem to scan 'em (when the field data isn’t already digital anyway).
I spent a couple of summers being what amounted to a courier at a mid-sized engineering firm.
I’m pretty sure that these days they just email each other the drawings and use something like Bluebeam to mark them up for each other. I seriously doubt they send a college kid haring across the general area with several sets of drawings to be delivered to or picked up from county engineering departments, city engineering departments, and construction companies.
Otherwise most of the jobs I’ve had have been of the sort that can’t reasonably be done by machines just yet.
I loved typing on them too. I never had one but there were two in the university library you could use and I’d type up my papers on them because they looked so much better than the typewriter I had. Plus funner.
My tiny library in my village still stamped books until last year when they digitized and joined a statewide interlibrary loan service. At the same time they retired their card catalog. They now use their beautifully crafted card catalog cabinets for a seed savers exchange.
I wasn’t a paid librarian but I worked in the school library in grade 7. I was trying to sneak some overdue books back into the return pile and avoid the overdue penalties. A cute girl asked my if I was there to join the Library Club. Of course I said yes and she showed me how to work the desk. Never had to pay any overdue costs till we moved somewhere else. I had no chance with the girl, she was a senior in grade 12.
Yeah, I moved from the painting to spotting oil and gas wells on mylar with ink. Then mapping oil/gas leases. Also ink on mylar.
Also worked for a Survey company around that time. Interpreting the surveyors notes to paper or mylar.
Then I worked digitizing phone lines and equipment. Had a big ole dig table. But could not actually digitize use it. The paper maps where not to scale and would have multiple scales on a single ‘map’. Digitizing meant to create an electronic map. The originals where really more of a schematic, that you had to turn into real world coordinates. It could be quite the challenge considering the absolute shit base maps at the time.
We did have good gear though. Big dig table, Duel color screens. a tablet that you would pull commands from and another place to pick individual commands for whatever project. We would pull those commands up with the puck. It had 12 buttons on it. so a lot of basic stuff was build into the puck. All Intergraph stuff with a monster DEC mainframe to write to. The room with the main frame was the size of a small apartment, and freaking freezing.
Currently, I’m on the applications side for public facing GIS. I do a lot of DB stuff too.
Done a lot of this stuff, and looking forward to retirement.
My job in the Air Force no longer exists. The mission was retired a short time ago and it is not likely to be reinstated for cost reasons.
My brother and I once took a temp job delivering phone books door to door. Hot and miserable work, especially the apartment complexes, because of all the stairs. At the end of the day we returned all the remaining books and never looked back again.
They did. They were transitioning to multi-media presentations but couldn’t make a go of it. There was really only one company in the area that might have wanted them, but that wasn’t going to be enough.
I’m in the Midwest, and we still have baggers. Whether the cashier does it may depend on the store, and how busy they are.
My sister and I did that once. I can’t remember how many days we lasted, but not many.
The summer after my freshman year in college, a friend talked me into joining her at a company selling crystal, china and silver, commission only of course. Our marks were newly engaged (or hopeful) young women and you had to get your own leads. My friends were all hippies and not interested in that stuff. I never found anyone to pitch, though I didn’t really try very hard. We went to a few “rah, rah, rah” sales meetings but didn’t last more than a month. My friend did sell something to her sister.
I did that right after I moved back to my present home in 2012. I was paid by the unit, and did it at dusk. Got plenty of exercise, anyway.
I also couldn’t believe what poor condition many of the houses in my area were in.