Have you ever held a job that doesn't exist anymore?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

I once worked at a job that existed for about 20 years, the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Maybe only about 12 or 15, from early 60s through mid-1970s.

I had a summer job installing air conditioners and TV sets in hospital rooms, upon the patient’s request. Much before this point, neither appliance existed to be installed, and after this point, both were simply installed routinely in every hospital room, but for a few years there, I had a job taking them out of one room and installing them in another. Or to be exact, taking them out, putting them in a storage room in the hospital’s basement, and hauling them out of storage and into the patient’s room. A lot of effort for no purpose until the hospital decided that ACs and TVs were desirable even if they weren’t used by a particular patient.

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I think what made the difference was the ability to leave the TV in the room while charging the patient to use it. There are still hospitals that charge for TV (and phone?!!!) service.

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Ha, one of my first jobs as a kid in high school. 1976. My mom asked for a TV repairman. We had one of those old console TV’s. The guy came but it had to go to the shop.

I offered to help load it in the truck. And did. Was offered a job right then and there. Two days a week after school moving those monsters.

I did learn the two most important things in an old time TV repair shop. Cold air spray, and mirrors. The spay to check for bad connections, the mirrors to see if what you where fiddling with from the back of the TV changed the picture any.

144

Forgot one - in high school I and a bunch of friends worked for the local orange growers every winter servicing and managing the smudge pots. Up at O-Dark-Thirty to mess with smelly, messy, hot smudge pots in pitch black groves for not very much money. It was the first paying job a lot of us had.

Thankfully, these days they use fans on the few groves that are left.

145

I finally caught up to the bottom of this thread I’ve wanted to post into since it first appeared a week ago. Funny coincidence versus the immediately previous poster …

When I was a kid in Orange County, CA in the early 1960s one of my dad’s pals owned an orange grove fan company. They installed and serviced the fans on tall poles installed throughout the many, many groves still in the county.

Back in the day, with remote control tech being so limited, they had armies of low-wage workers to drive out to each farmer’s grove, push the start buttons on each individual pole, and deal with the inevitable failures to start on whatever fraction of machines screwed up. Given the nature of coastal weather in SoCal, the emergency “Oh Noes! There’s going to be cold temps, fire up the fans!” orders always went out around 10pm or midnight. Ugh. I hated that call.

There are substantially zero groves left in So Cal, so the job & company are obsolete locally.

My own obsolete jobs, of which there are several:

In HS / junior college my first IT job was maintaining plug boards for IBM tab equipment. This was the early 1970s and that job was already in its buggy whip days then. By even 1990 I bet there was none of that gear alive anywhere on earth except in a museum.

I graduated to programming on punch cards (and yes, ASR/KSR-33s). Then a near-endless succession of now-dead languages on now-dead OSes running on now-dead hardware.

Like some other folks upthread, my first USAF job from the early-mid 1980s is now obsolete and has been for a decade or two. I was a flying Forward Air Controller (“FAC”). The mission still exists, but now it’s done (badly) in fast jets, not in slow but unsurvivable prop planes. The ground FAC role of my job used to require an officer / pilot do the work, but it’s now done by enlisted specialists. The details of how it’s done have morphed completely as well, despite similarities in the big picture.

My first airline job in the late 1980s - early 1990s was as a flight engineer, the 3rd crewman in the cockpit. There are substantially zero flight engineers in passenger service anywhere on Earth, and only a few dozen airplanes (max) still in civilian freighter service that need flight engineers. The military still uses them on some old equipment but even they have broadened the duties of the FE to encompass other roles. Preparatory to phasing them out completely.

In the early 1990s I also started and ran a company in the 900-number business. The tech still exists, but the business model doesn’t.

I seem to excel at getting on on the trailing edge of the last big thing. I’m now retired and I hope for everyone else’s sake that I’m not one of the last Americans to have that opportunity before our shit hits the fan and everyone works 'til they drop. Like back in Ye Olde Darke Ages.

146

Back during the short period I worked as an auto mechanic, one of my specialties was carburetors, especially Holley carbs. It’s been about 10 years since I touched one but I still have all the specialty tools.

147

“California is the largest orange-producing state in the United States, and in 2023–2024, it’s expected to produce 1.66 million tons of oranges. This is more than double the projected harvest for Florida, which is expected to produce 837,000 tons.”

Now I guess many of these are in the Imperial Valley or Central Valley (Kern, etc counties), but there are certainly orange groves in SoCal. Mind you, the only orange grove in Orange county is in the Irvine Ranch Historic Park.

148

I was a video store clerk for two years. I know there are still a few of those around, but they’re pretty endangered. All the handling and ordering of VHS tapes has certainly gone the way of the dodo. I like to think there a few humans roaming the cities who still have their laserdisc player repair skills.

149

The Big-Y where I grocery shop has some baggers. They are all intellectually challenged. They don’t have one at every check out and sometimes idle checkers bag as well.

150

Thank you for the correction / clarification.

What I was thinking was “no orange groves in Orange County.” The county where I grew up and which pretty well defined the CA citrus industry in the 1950s/60s. But you’re right that that’s not what I wrote.

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That is what I thought you meant, so i added that bit about Irvine Ranch Historic Park.

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I was coming to post this one as well (along with the hand insertion of ads in newspapers which I already posted). I would get the call at 3:00AM and head to the orchards to light the pots. They are going the way of the dodo-bird.

Another ag job I did that is going away is hand detasseling of corn. Did it for two summers for Pioneer Seed Co. They could pay below fed min wage since it was ag work. I think I made around $1.30/hour for this shitty, shitty job.

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Most detasseling can be done nowadays by machine, but they do hire people around here to get the ones the machine didn’t catch. I had several friends who did it when we were 14 or 15 years old, in the late 1970s, and they made about $500 for 3 weeks’ work, very good money for teens at that time, but I had absolutely no desire to do it myself, especially when I found out that I would have to get up at 5am.

154

I did it in the mid-80s and they paid a lot less. I made a couple hundred dollars max over the “season” and it was extremely hot, dirty work. I made a lot more money working the other ag jobs I had (working at a cattle ranch and changing irrigation lines, both hand and motorized).

155

I began my career writing code and supporting our Shops in-house programming.

It included Student Accounts, Registration, General Accounting, Payroll, HR, and Parking modules.

I missed the opportunity to work on the team that designed and wrote the programs. System Analysts went to the departments an studied their work flow. All the paper forms.

The input Screens were designed to look similar to the paper. The workflow had to be similar. They tried to avoid disrupting the Staff and how they worked. Laws govern HR and financial records. That had to be included in the in-house System.

I wrote many programs to support the four year-old legacy software.

That ended a few years later.

There are specialized Companies that sell Canned Software packages to Universities. They send trainers to facilitate the conversion from the legacy system to their software.

For me it became boring. We weren’t allowed to modify the System. I applied Software Patches, wrote SQL reports and answered Staff questions.

Nearly all fields of business have Software Packages tailored to their needs.

It would be very unusual to Custom write a business software package in-house.

It used to be done at many larger businesses that could afford to hire a programming staff.

That’s gone now.

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How about a job that you didn’t take? During my early college years there was a off-hours class sponsored by the Department of Defense (I think), specifically for students studying Civil Engineering, in preparation for a summer gig. They taught you how to measure and estimate and calculate floor space, count windows and doors and stairs, building and wall materials, etc. It had to be entered very precisely into a paper form, in order to create a catalog of…
Civil Defense Fallout Shelters. I received a better offer and didn’t take the job, but I doubt that that job exists anymore; I haven’t seen one of those yellow and black triangle signs in years.