Occupations that no longer exist.

[Eyresandgraces]

I was changing the bed and remembered that in the 1970’s, so not that long ago, dh’s aunt was a tick turner for Fogarty’s.
She spent her whole working day turning pillowcases the correct way round and pointing the corners with her thumbs.
i can’t imagine such a monotonous job.

I found a list of old occupations but Tick turner is not listed.

A Tosher made a living by scavenging the Victorian sewers. Grim.

Please feel free to add any you can think of.

https://rmhh.co.uk/occup/a.html

My uncle worked in the printing trade from leaving school at sixteen until he sadly died young in his forties. Worked at the same place his whole working life.

I can vouch for the lollipop ladies/men! I can think of two who are still going strong where I live! 😀

A stenographer usually uses a machine called a stenograph machine, or steno machine. The keyboard has 22 keys and they type in a phonetic-based shorthand - they type on it in syllables rather than letters so that they can write whole words and phrases in one stroke. So it's kind of like a short hand, but done on a machine (so like a computer keyboard and screen but not with the traditional QWERTY keyboard).

How interesting! I bet you loved that! A friend of mine used to work at a car sales showroom in the early nineties, and at the end of every working day she would be sent to the bank with a swag bag of cash (thousands of pounds) to pay into the bank. She used to tootle off down there in her high heels with the money in her hand bag. She was about twenty at the time. No security. Can't imagine that happening now! 😂

In around 1978 when I was 23 I worked for a millionaire in Park Lane. He was the owner of a big department store in Tehran. I had to take as much as £3,000 cash from the bank down the road for him. At that time, where I live now, you could have bought a house for that money but it was just for his his weekend gambling. They had to shut up the business and disappear when the Ayatollah Khomeni took over in Iran.

The housekeeper told me about some white powder they used to sniff from rolled up bank notes. She had no idea what it was.

My 81-year-old mum boasts that her stepfather and his workmate were coalmen to Sir Winston Churchill back in the late 1950s and managed to diddle him out of two sacks of coal!

He'd ordered a ton of coal, which came in 20 sacks. They humped the sacks one by one on their shoulders into Chartwell...but each had one empty coalsack tucked away beneath their aprons. As they delivered their contents into the coal-cellar, Churchill told them to leave the emptied sacks in a tidy heap on the floor and he kept careful count of them.

After they'd done 14 sacks, Churchill was asked to take an urgent phone call in his office. He ordered the two coalmen to stop work and wait where they were until he came back to resume. In his absence they each whipped out their hidden empty sack and added them to the pile.

Churchill returned, they dumped out four more sacks and declared they'd now delivered 20. Churchill insisted he made it 18. They innocently invited him to count the empty sacks on the floor. He did, and of course there were 20. He apologised very decently to them, assuming he'd lost count when he was called away to the phone.

Bill and Norman accepted his apology graciously and drove off with two sacks of coal still stashed away in the lorry - one hundredweight of coal each for their own families' comfort!

My first job was actually as a word processor: someone who knew enough about computers to type words into them.

@Runki Yeah, it was massive. I guess it wasn't good for their health though, breathing in all the fumes. They probably didn't have proper ventilation or PPE. I remember an older male mate saying it was the London equivalent of working down the coal mine!

So interesting!
Glass eye making is a critically endangered skill!

Gosh. How interesting. I was only a kid when my uncle died so never thought to ask him anything about his job. Wish I had now. He died of lung cancer. He smoked like a chimney but I wonder if it was exacerbated by years of working in what may as well have been a coal mine.....it was in London too.

Very much so round here! Same tubes as in the 70s! 😁

Yes this is exactly like my workspace - meeting after meeting to discuss further meetings!
Too many management layers!

I worked as a 100 operator in the mid 90s in the night shift. We used to have a list of numbers to call for a "wake up call" in the morning! Seems so odd now!

Evening Standard went digital (The Standard) in August. I think there might be one weekly paper copy now, possibly on Thursdays. But there’s no one giving it out any more.

why?

Because (a) I don't think AIs and machines will be able to adequately replace those in 100 years and (b) we won't want them to.

When my DD was a toddler and was drawing and colouring, her DF kept wondering why she was writing lots of squiggles in a book. He suddenly realised, she was trying to copy my shorthand! I was doing private medical secretarial work from home at the time, so she saw me do it on a regular basis.

@Runki yeah, I think it was common for guys 'on the print' to have lung issues. No doubt they all smoked too, but then so did most of the population in any profession before the dangers were widely known. Even then it was hard to quit as it was still socially accepted and there was no nicotine replacement therapy.
The printing chemicals and stuff were heavy duty. The guy I knew said his mates would be all black and dirty after every shift, hence the coal mine comparison.

I was a punchcard operator for a hospital board in the sixties long before the age of computers. Still have a slight dent in my ring finger to show for it!

That is shocking really as is how difficult it is to find someone to put up a tv aerial

Bringing back the tea lady (or tea person as they would be nowadays) might be a way of encouraging people back to the office! In the mid 90s, we used to have a trolley lady who pushed a trolley full of snacks, sandwiches, cakes, etc round the office, it was great!

@Rocknrollstar my mum who is only 75 was a switchboard operator at Salford Uni. She was a higher earner than my dad before they had my brother. She said it was an interesting and challenging job

I had a distant relative who used to travel to Jewish people's homes on a Saturday to 'set' the fire and then later to keep it going.

Not many coal fires these days so there is no need to employ someone, you can set the heating for the weekend.

I'm an occasional film photographer., there are very few places that develop camera film negatives, or print the prints.

So is mine!