I had a job for a brief while in college that involved creating posters from actual movable type. I was terrible at it.
My first real job was working in a supermarket, stocking shelves and tagging products. Price tag guns - are they still made?
•I was also a stand-alone arcade attendant. Mostly made change and reset “stuck” games. I got really good at Skeeball that summer.
•In college, I worked at a Music/Dance library that had a huge collection of vinyl albums. The music and dance students often checked out music for their classes, so my job was to dub the albums on to cassettes, which were more easily replaced when the students trashed them. I had to listen to all the albums all the way through in case the record skipped so I could nudge the needle. It was a good gig; I listened to classical and jazz all day while doing my homework. That’s how I fell in love with Mozart.
I wish I could say it was obsolete in the sense that they don’t do that anymore, but my first job as a librarian out of grad school I was the sole librarian in an art museum library and I had to do my own cataloging (not obsolete) and then put this 3.5 floppy disk into the creaking old computer and work with this program that was green text on black to make catalog cards, and then file them. This was in 2004. I had nightmares about dropping card drawers.
Me too! Woe to the person who couldn’t stick down a straight rule. I did all this at an actual newspaper too, where I had a job as editor/reporter (c. 1985). I knew how to run a phototypesetter, too.
This was going to be my obsolete job: daily newspaper reporter. They are a vanishing breed.
In the early 80’s a company I worked for had an old fashioned switchboard at the reception desk, with lights and plugs on long cords like you’d see in an old movie. We all took turns manning the switchboard. I got quite good at it, no problems connecting callers with the right department. When they went over to the computerized thing, I was all confused and cut so many people off that they wouldn’t let me do my turn at the switchboard any more.
Me too! And I’ll never use the skill again, but when you do everything by hand, it does give a better perspective of layout and why certain things go in certain places.
I used to work in a one-hour photo place. With the proliferation of digital cameras and home photo printers, it seems like one-hour places might be on their way out.
I was a keypuncher (data entry operator) for several summers while in college. On the old 80 column punch cards, no less.
While data entry operators are certainly still around, I suspect there are a LOT fewer of them what with all the direct entry of stuff, and I’d be a large sum of money there aren’t too many places that still use the punchcards.
From about 1992 - 1997 I did A/R and credit related programming in COBOL on DEC VAX machines. I guess COBOL isn’t quite obsolete yet, but it is true that nobody wants to develop software with it.
By tuner do you mean a piano tuner, the person you called in once in awhile to tune your piano? I never heard of those people being on the staff of theaters or other venues; AFAIK they always operated independently and continue to do so. An individual piano, or even all the pianos owned by, say, the Juilliard School, don’t need tuning often enough to warrant permanently employing a tuner.
I used to do paste-up at a local newspaper. Neither the job or newspaper exist anymore.
In college, I worked turnstile at the library. You had to let me look through your bags, purses and all, to make sure you weren’t stealing books before I clicked the button to let you go through the turnstile and leave the library. And don’t even try putting tampons on top, or underwear. I wasn’t squeamish and would gleefully dig out that book of sensual poetry you ‘accidently forgot you had’. Go directly to the circulation desk with that young lady, do not pass go, do not take 200
dollars!
Back at the end of the 1990s and the start of 2000s I worked in an office that provided taped textbooks for blind people. Among other things we hired readers and catalogued textbooks. This service has been replaced by screen reading technology.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to phrase that ambiguously. No one has a piano tuner on staff, not even Juilliard. But, a place that is serious about its pianos sounding good will have a (self employed) tuner come out at least twice a year. Fancy places will have a tuning before every major performance or even do different styles of tuning to suit the music that is being played.
What I was trying to say is that, as pianos have become less common, fewer and fewer people keep up that level of maintenance. The vast majority of people who call my mom are folks who have some piano, that functions mainly to hold up picture frames, who need a tuning because Grandma is coming to visit. Usually, it has been so long since the piano was tuned, she can’t stretch the strings out to the proper pitch without risking breakage. Instead, she tunes the piano to itself, so any songs played will sound basically correct but won’t match another instrument.
She has a few repeat customers with hotels and churches, but even those guys don’t bust out their real piano as often as they used to. She’s lucky to talk them into a tuning once a year.
When I was a kid, she could book 3-4 tunings a day. Now, if she can get that a week, she’s happy. She makes up the difference teaching piano playing.
Hey! My Dad told stories about his time as a pinsetter, too. He was allowed the close down the lanes of jerks who would heave a ball at him while he was setting the pins up, usually with the excuse that he was taking too long.
Me, too. I’m glad someone else remembers punch cards!
Walking beans. Baling hay (in the sense that teenage boys throw 40+ pounds around.)
I used to stamp prices on cans and boxes in a supermarket. When the prices changed, I scrubbed them off or stickered over them and restamped.
Barcode scanners made me obsolete.
At the mall. Between Glamor Shots and the Orange Julius kiosk.
I worked at a newspaper in the 90s, and we used physical cut and paste of waxed paper. The newspapers would be manually pasted together on large sheets of paper and then shipped off to the printing press. I’m absolutely sure this type of work is no longer done.
And if you are ever asked to buck hay bales, ask if it’s hay or alfalfa.
Damn alfalfa bales were like 80 lbs.