One guy baled up a bunch of damn green weeds. You’d pull and the wire would stretch, but you couldn’t get the middle off the ground. Must have weighed 150 pounds.
BTW, hand detasseling of corn by teenagers is **not **obsolete. The various types are all hybrids made by two rows of male plants pollinating six rows of detasseled female plants.
This doesn’t quite count, because it wasn’t really my “job”, but…
My first job in the film industry was as a production assistant, and I was assigned to work with the editor. One of my primary duties was to load the Moviola. I got really good and fast at it. This was in the early to mid 90s, and within a year or two, AVIDs and other NLE became more and more common. Hell, even at that time, Moviolas weren’t seen too often; flatbeds were much more common. But the editor I was working with was very old-school. I’m glad I learned how to do it, but it was a skill I never needed to use again.
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone working on a Moviola today. I’m sure I would no longer be able to load it.
Proofreading computer punch cards. (Yes really.)
Find any hanging chads?
If you need me, I’ll be back in the year 2000.
My Grandfather was a cane cutter. My Dad was a tram conductor. Things are not looking good for me.
Yeah, and wait till you get to some that have mud baled up in them. That can really kill you.
Surveyor of property boundaries using a theodolite (a glorified compass - NOT the infrared electronic kind) mounted on a tripod, assisted by someone with a staff, and a 50-meter tape measure. Because it was in deep forest, a line of sight had to be hacked away with machetes between each “shot”.
Today, this would be done with a GPS – more accurate (over long distances), faster, and no need to hack down lines of sight. BUT, GPS does need a rather clear area above it (to get a good satellite signal), so there would still be some hacking to do.
Thank you for the memory. I also walked beans and baled hay. (I consider baling hay to be the best job I ever had, because I was so frigging buff afterwords!)
Are you from southwest Minnesota? I walked beans on my uncle’s farm by Luverne, many many years ago.
I worked at a Video Rental store. They still exist, but even so I’d say they’re pretty much obsolete at this point.
Prior to that, I worked in a bookstore. I can only hope that they continue to remain relevant…
I worked in the produce department at a grocery store and my job was to weigh customers fruits and vegetables, slap a tag on the bag and write the price on it. Now cashiers have scales at the register.
In college, I had a temp job as a verifier for a company that published phone books. I spent weeks calling people in Edina and Eden Prarie, Minnesota asking to verify their phone numbers and addresses. I am guessing that they don’t do this any more.
From age 11-15, I was a paperboy. Although there are still newspaper carriers, they aren’t kids on bikes schlepping a huge canvas bag full of newspapers.
Another bean hoer here. Snicker
Best job I ever had. Good tan, strong arms and legs, hangin’ with my homies listening to our transistor radios. And a whole dollar a row!
Car hop at a drive in. Another good job. Get to meet all the boys with cars!
Dish washer at the local restaurant. Yes. Really washed the dishes by hand. And patted the hamburgers by hand.
My first piano teacher used to play the piano for the silent movies. There might still be people doing that.
And when I was a librarian my freshman year in college we hand-stamped the books.
Luverne is God’s Country.
I used to set up and operate Brown and Sharpe screw machines. They still exist, but they were nearly extinct when I started working on them 6 years ago.
It’s funny… You would have a far easier time setting up an old school desk if you really went old school - using a T-square or a Mayline (even Wright had basic parallel bars in his studios).
This stuff is not hard to find at all, especially with so many firms closing. One firm I worked at had a blue line machine* that would have been happy to give to you! Drafting machines are available on eBay (a friend purchased one for 20 dollars a few months ago). T-Squares, triangles, electric erasers, rapidographs, board cover, eraser shields, pounce, Mylar, vellum… All of these I have seen in my local art shop. Antiques in great shape, such as slide rulers, are available but can cost a bit as people collect them.
I was laid off and returned to get my masters in architecture. Very few students know how to ink, letter or layout a sheet now.
- blue prints as seen in cartoons, etc- the blue background with white lines were never produced when I worked. It was always blue line (blue ink on white background). It was my experience (began working in the 90’s) that only people who had no knowledge of architecture called them blueprints.
Yeah, for the guys who got hired for an entire summer. Still a very hard, nasty job though. I was usually one of the guys up in the barn choking on dust and heat, not working all that much - a few weeks each summer.
Central Illinois was my turf. At one point (my mid-upper 20’s?), I could accurately say that I worked half my life for $1 an hour.
I also worked in the industry, as a Linotype machinist. Having been a Torpedoman’s Mate in the Navy.
Recently saw a Mergenthaler in a job shop printer in a small town in Turkey-that was actually working!
I actually used to operate a blue line/blue print machine - ammonia kind.
We would run the prints out on vellum, and then pass the vellum through on top of the blue-line paper. Whatever was dark on the vellum would turn dark blue on the paper - all the rest would be light blue.
We had to hand feed each drawing through - and if you had a set of vellums to make, you would try to get in a decent rhythm. (most gov’t contract jobs required a min of 10 copies per drawing.) But you had to be careful - get too close and a huge blast of ammonia aroma would fill your nostrils and make your eyes water.
I also hand folded all the drawings in C, D, E, F, and Z folds as needed. And yes, I can refold a map - why do you ask?
Some people used rulers to make the creases sharp - but after a while, it was faster for me to use my fingers - which meant I had no fingerprints on several of my fingers most days. They were just rubbed right off.
This is incorrect. Many music schools have piano tuners on staff–mine included. I don’t know for sure that Juilliard does, but I would expect that it has at least one.
An average sized music school can easily have well over 100 pianos, all seeing regular and heavy use: almost every faculty studio has piano, every piano studio has two pianos, almost every practice room has a piano and some have two for piano duets, every classroom has at least one piano, the “piano classroom” for teaching group piano has 8-12 pianos and there can be more than one of these, and there are the concert pianos in the recital and concert halls.
For anyone who says that an electronic piano “sounds as good as an electric piano”: :rolleyes:
Door to door encyclopedia salesman.