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Reminds me when words per minute was like, A Thing. I remember my mom taking typing courses to improve her wpm for a secretary position, now it's bizarre when someone can't type quickly.
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# ? May 2, 2021 00:53 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 04:01 |
Anne Whateley posted:Stenographers might be the biggest one recently
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# ? May 2, 2021 00:55 |
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:My drunk brain read this as steganographers, and I wanted to know if that was a real occupation, because that sounds loving rad. Steganography is a thing.
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# ? May 2, 2021 00:59 |
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Anne Whateley posted:Court reporters still exist, but it's a whole different world from the one where every big office had a steno pool and women routinely trained in Gregg or Pitman shorthand. I bet there are fewer people who use that today than there are sheep-shearers. I remember seeing a class on Gregg shorthand in the class listing in high school around the turn of the century. i don't know of anyone who took it, if it was even seriously offered at that point or, were someone actually interested in it for whatever reason, if they actually had someone in the building who could teach it.
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:13 |
Oh, it's not just a thing, it's an artform (check out the spoilers if you're too lazy to find them yourself). Inspired by POC||STFU, there's also a NES ROM which is a ZIP file, but using a different mechanism. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 01:20 on May 2, 2021 |
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:16 |
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I type very fast, but typing tests penalize you for making errors, so I'd score disastrously after years of riding the backspace key like it's a Hitachi wand.Cobalt-60 posted:Pre-paid phone cards; used to be they were sold everywhere. I had one I carried and recharged for years, so i could make pay phone phone calls without needing change, or call my friends without my parents asking questions about the bill. CodfishCartographer posted:Tangentially on topic, but I feel within the spirit of this thread: what are some jobs that don't exist anymore? It's interesting to think about professions that people devoted their lives to that are entirely irrelevant. Are operators still around? There was a good interview in the San Francisco Chronicle (sorry, I can't find it) with a former toll-taker on the Golden Gate Bridge. They'd been planning on shutting down all the manned tollbooths, but coronavirus sped that up. Nowadays the toll plazas just scan for your LastPass (local electronic toll-paying device) or, finding no LastPass, scan your license plate and send the toll to the address associated with that plate. There used to be a service advertised at dry cleaners called "invisible mending" in which the mender unraveled threads from the side seams of your suit or jacket and used those threads to weave in and out of a hole/tear so that it looked just like the original fabric. Haven't seen those ads in a while.
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:21 |
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CodfishCartographer posted:Huh, I always assumed copilots were there for safety purposes. Make sure there's nothing key that the main pilot forgets, or in the event that main pilot had a heart attack or something and someone needs to take over. That's what I mean by redundancy, they don't actually do anything that the pilot can't do on his own. The plane can be piloted by a single individual but they have a second pilot always on standby in case something goes wrong. At one time the co-pilot was literally co-piloting the plane, helping with the various controls and monitoring instruments to help the pilot. Some other once prolific jobs that are now gone: Elevator operators - There was a time when every elevator car had a person who spent all their time controlling it via a hand controller. Manual/Mechanical/Photographic Typesetters - less than 50 years ago typesetting was a career that employed thousands and thousands of skilled people. - Manual typesetters assembled blocks of text for printing from individual metal letters. Until as recently as the 1980's big department stores still employed manual typesetters to create all their price-tags and in store signage. - Mechanical typesetters operated massive machines that produced and arranged the metal letters for blocks of printed text in newspapers and magazines. Big newspapers would have entire floors of their buildings devoted to rows of these machines and the people who operated them. - Photographic typesetters used a photographic process to create printing sheets instead of metal type but still required a manual operator to enter and arrange the letters. There are also dozens of very specific specialized jobs with printing, like color separators, but they were never as numerous as typesetters.
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:25 |
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'Gregg or Pittman' shorthand??
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:25 |
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:27 |
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Anne Whateley posted:Court reporters still exist, but it's a whole different world from the one where every big office had a steno pool and women routinely trained in Gregg or Pitman shorthand. I bet there are fewer people who use that today than there are sheep-shearers. Sheep-shearing hasn't gone away at all AFAIK. it's a seasonal job, but in-season a skilled shearer can earn quite a bit.
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:39 |
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I'd say that the typical store salesman job has gone away for the most part. Back in the day you'd go to your department store and it would be staffed by usually older gentlemen, wearing a suit and being very attentive to what you're looking for and could give relevant information on all the different types of products they stocked. More of a personal experience and maybe you'd ask for their help if you returned to the store for another purchase. It would be enough to make a living on and raise a family, possibly be your job until retirement. Nowadays the stores are run by what seems like a skeleton crew of non-commissioned teenagers who couldn't care less whether or not you make a purchase and probably couldn't even tell you what products they even stocked.
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# ? May 2, 2021 01:59 |
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To be honest I prefer the current way to dealing with a pushy salesman pretending to be my buddy, but you're right. If I actually go to a store, I've already decided what I want, I just need to know if they have it. Edit: in my hometown there's a local furniture superstore that grew to the point where all the other furniture stores opened on the same street as them. Eventually, though, the superstore bought out most of the competitors but kept the names the same. The funny bit is that the superstore is known for having REALLY attentive old-fashioned salespeople. The competitor across the street always advertised that they weren't pushy and would leave you alone to shop. They still advertise that now, but they're owned by the same people. Imagined fucked around with this message at 02:08 on May 2, 2021 |
# ? May 2, 2021 02:02 |
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The Lone Badger posted:Sheep-shearing hasn't gone away at all AFAIK. it's a seasonal job, but in-season a skilled shearer can earn quite a bit. Sheep shearing is 100% still a thing because sheep have been bred to grow such insane amounts of wool that they will die if they aren't sheared.
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# ? May 2, 2021 02:09 |
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Arsenic Lupin posted:There was a good interview in the San Francisco Chronicle (sorry, I can't find it) with a former toll-taker on the Golden Gate Bridge. They'd been planning on shutting down all the manned tollbooths, but coronavirus sped that up. Nowadays the toll plazas just scan for your LastPass (local electronic toll-paying device) or, finding no LastPass, scan your license plate and send the toll to the address associated with that plate. It’s the end of an era.
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# ? May 2, 2021 02:11 |
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CodfishCartographer posted:Sheep shearing is 100% still a thing because sheep have been bred to grow such insane amounts of wool that they will die if they aren't sheared. Also we can't make a machine that can sheer an irregular shaped and often wiggling animal without killing them.
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# ? May 2, 2021 02:13 |
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CodfishCartographer posted:Yeah I was thinking about these too. Watch repair is maybe the one thing that still sticks around cus rich dudes love their watches. Film development is weird. A lot of niche developers have popped up recently. Like I don’t shoot film often at all, but it went from having to send the occasional roll to Dwayne’s to suddenly having a lot of other smaller options. I have noticed they focus on development and scanning rather than printing though. Also ‘quality’ can be suspect, although I’ve been lucky so far. Servicing cameras though is terrible. I remember getting my old 35mm serviced locally like it was no problem. It might be cheaper now to just buy ‘new’ used cameras and hope they last a couple of years.
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# ? May 2, 2021 02:43 |
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The Lone Badger posted:Sheep-shearing hasn't gone away at all AFAIK. it's a seasonal job, but in-season a skilled shearer can earn quite a bit.
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# ? May 2, 2021 02:49 |
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Vietnamwees posted:I don't think I've EVER seen a porn with a milkman scenario, but then again, I don't really watch pornography for the plot anyway. I have a VHS porn tape where that is exactly the plot of one of the scenes.
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# ? May 2, 2021 03:25 |
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Medical scribes, who would take notation for doctors. Transcriptionists are also slowly going the way of the dinosaur for most common jobs.
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# ? May 2, 2021 03:30 |
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ultrafilter posted:Elevator operators. subpar anachronism posted:Medical scribes, who would take notation for doctors.
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# ? May 2, 2021 03:37 |
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If anyone wants to see a real-life elevator operator you should check out this bookstore on Michigan Ave in Chicago. Looking at Google maps, it may have been The Dial, but the name doesn't ring a bell.
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# ? May 2, 2021 03:55 |
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CodfishCartographer posted:Reminds me when words per minute was like, A Thing. I remember my mom taking typing courses to improve her wpm for a secretary position, now it's bizarre when someone can't type quickly. My daughter had the record for Mavis Beacon Typing at her high school, More than 160 wpm
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# ? May 2, 2021 04:44 |
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Blue Moonlight posted:We made flash cards out of 3x5 notecards for our kids, and my wife still uses them as an outline/organization tool sometimes. My first produced mobile game was flash cards. 2000. You would go to a website, put in questions and answers ... and then on a phone students would see the questions via. WAP (crude mobile browser), think of the answer, press a button to see the answer, and then press buttons to indicate if they had guessed right or wrong. Then they could do the questions they had gotten wrong the first time. Kidsmedia was the company. NOTE: I had forgotten about this, but the flash card thing reminded me.
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# ? May 2, 2021 04:49 |
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In this day and age I imagine bragging about your WPM is like bragging about your IQ: impressive in theory, but in practice people will either be unimpressed, assume you're lying, or think you're a weirdo for even caring what your score is enough to remember it and brag about it.
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# ? May 2, 2021 05:49 |
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My school had typing in middle school. 45 WPM, 95% accuracy was the goal. Never quite got it. Didn't like Mavis Beacon because you had to go back and change your errors; being off by one character would make all the rest off. Data entry used to be a job you could get fairly easily; I remember applying for a couple jobs. Ice delivery used to be a thing, although that vanished with milk delivery. Full service gas stations used to be a thing; now I don't see them outside of New Jersey.
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# ? May 2, 2021 07:09 |
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Our middle school typing program counted hitting enter as a full line with one error. Could get as many wpm as necessary with that.
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# ? May 2, 2021 07:13 |
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Cobalt-60 posted:My school had typing in middle school. 45 WPM, 95% accuracy was the goal. Never quite got it. Didn't like Mavis Beacon because you had to go back and change your errors; being off by one character would make all the rest off. Oregon still has attendants to pump your gas, and you're not allowed to pump it yourself. It's always jarring and even the teenagers employed to pump it always shrug and go "I dunno why it's like this either" Ironically it's probably good for lessening covid spread, though.
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# ? May 2, 2021 07:37 |
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People used to be employed as "knocker-uppers," at least in London. Their job was to bang on peoples' windows and wake them up. But who knocks up the knocker-uppers? And how did it take so long to invent a reliable alarm clock? There was also a great migratory species, the lamplighter, which would circle the earth twice a day lighting and extinguishing their lamps with sunset and sunrise. Except at the North and South poles, which it visited only twice a year.
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# ? May 2, 2021 08:05 |
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AmbassadorofSodomy posted:Milkman. They're back as a kind of retro hipster thing in some places.
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# ? May 2, 2021 10:25 |
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DACK FAYDEN posted:l That’s not the only place you see them at all, they’re everywhere in ERs. Turns out having someone take your notes for you is super useful when you have a lot going on. Trying to take notes on a conversation you’re having also sucks and makes it easy to miss stuff.
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# ? May 2, 2021 10:38 |
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BonHair posted:Filing clerks. The guys putting all the memos and poo poo into physical files and also were able to find them again. These are less common, sure, but filling clerk is definitely a living job at any office with a requirement for physical document retention. I work at an IRS facility with a standalone file warehouse, and our clerks sure as hell earn their pay.
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# ? May 2, 2021 10:40 |
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kaschei posted:People used to be employed as "knocker-uppers," at least in London. Their job was to bang on peoples' windows and wake them up. But who knocks up the knocker-uppers? And how did it take so long to invent a reliable alarm clock? I was surprised to learn recently that there is still a small crew of lamplighters operating in London, tending to the gas lamps that still work there. Of course they're resident now and not migratory.
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# ? May 2, 2021 11:13 |
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I’m not sure why, but I felt a little sad when I learned Mavis Beacon wasn’t a real person.
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# ? May 2, 2021 13:33 |
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People literally sweeping streets is slowly dying the death of automation. Maybe one day in techno-hell future, we'll have automated street sweeping roomba's to do all the hard work of keeping the sidewalks clean.
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# ? May 2, 2021 14:08 |
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Antivehicular posted:These are less common, sure, but filling clerk is definitely a living job at any office with a requirement for physical document retention. I work at an IRS facility with a standalone file warehouse, and our clerks sure as hell earn their pay. Yeah considering the ream of papers I had to physically sign to buy my house, escrow agencies must still have file clerks.
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# ? May 2, 2021 14:41 |
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Bucnasti posted:Yeah considering the ream of papers I had to physically sign to buy my house, escrow agencies must still have file clerks. I would guess all that stuff gets scanned and tossed in a dated box somewhere never to be seen again by human eyes unless you go to court over something sometime, because I work in local government and that's what happens to the paper part of our paperwork. Just have a warehouse full of boxes of already-digitized papers dated from X date to X date, and only keep them for the legally mandated minimum number of years before shredding them. In the off chance someone needs it, they just look up the date it came in and dig through the box from that approximate date. Imagined fucked around with this message at 14:46 on May 2, 2021 |
# ? May 2, 2021 14:43 |
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Imagined posted:I would guess all that stuff gets scanned and tossed in a dated box somewhere never to be seen again by human eyes unless you go to court over something sometime, because I work in local government and that's what happens to the paper part of our paperwork. Just have a warehouse full of boxes of already-digitized papers dated from X date to X date, and only keep them for the legally mandated minimum number of years before shredding them. In the off chance someone needs it, they just look up the date it came in and dig through the box from that approximate date. Why bother digitizing if you're just gonna search through them by hand anyway?
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# ? May 2, 2021 15:10 |
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Used to be, you could hire a "clipping service" to send you a copy every time a particular topic was mentioned in the newspaper. You'd have hundreds of people per firm employed in reading every major newspaper in the country and literally cutting out the article to mail to you if it mentioned your name/your business/your industry/your product/your research topic/etc. This later expanded to transcribing or sending recordings of radio and TV broadcasts. Basically Google Alerts, but done by hand.
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# ? May 2, 2021 15:22 |
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Slimy Hog posted:Why bother digitizing if you're just gonna search through them by hand anyway? retention laws are a thing for a lot of industries, especially ones where lawsuits and fraud are common. they likely are required to retain physical documents for a few years, and digital documents for a decade.
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# ? May 2, 2021 15:22 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 04:01 |
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A Festivus Miracle posted:People literally sweeping streets is slowly dying the death of automation. Maybe one day in techno-hell future, we'll have automated street sweeping roomba's to do all the hard work of keeping the sidewalks clean. In South Philly they stopped street sweeping because people very very much didn't want to move their cars. However, there's lots and lots of trash everywhere. So they've been experimenting with a labor intensive street sweeping operation with crews using leaf blowers to clean the streets around the parked cars.
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# ? May 2, 2021 15:29 |