What odd jobs did you have in the past?

Love a video about jobs that no longer exist where it's using an AI narrator instead of a human. Looks like our job might be going away too haha

The transition from horses to cars created a significant change in jobs in the 20th century. That could be its own video.

Milkmen still exist in the UK, although in very small numbers. Around 2% (1 in 50) of UK households still get milk delivered in glass bottles from milkmen (or milkwomen).

Thanks. When I was a kid, I used to get paid to pick stones from farmers fields.

I loved the phone number on the side of the milk truck '210' !! I had a job as a pretzel seller in an indoor/outdoor flea market. I would have to get my cart that had a heating element in it, that would bake and keep warm the pretzels. I would have to push the cart out to my assigned location for the day. I can still feel the burns on all my knuckles from reaching in the cart to get out the warm pretzels. LOL

You rarely see any gas station attendants checking your oil, cleaning your windows, or checking your tires. Welcome to the self serve era.

I was a bag boy for A&P, filled the paper bags and followed the customer to their car and maybe get a 25 ct tip all for a $1.60/hr.

Hello. I was born in 1967. Both my grandparents, and my family had a milk man. We lived not far from each other, within walking distance. The milkman delivered through the early 1970's, we had a metal insulated milk box outside the front door. We also used to buy soda (by the bottle) from a soda production company a short drive away. Soda came in big bottles served in a large wooden box for 12 bottles. (This was in Connecticut).

I was an usher at a theater.

It wasn't exactly an odd job but when I was a child we didn't always go to the grocery store. My parents would send me around the neighborhood to different places to get what we needed. Needed bacon go to the hog farm, need lettuce go to the other farm, need eggs hit the neighbor up that has chickens. Personally I think we need to find a healthy balance between technology and labor.

At 4:30 those guys are better dressed than most people are now when they go shopping.

I started as a switchboard operator in 1970. I used boards exactly like some in the video.

House my dad grew up in had ice box. The apartment building i lived in in San Diego was built in 1906 and some of the units still had the ice box in them. There was a dumb waiter in each apartment because i guess there were meals served to the women who lived there. It was originally for ladies who were single and part of the 9-5 work world.

My father had a milk route and I worked with him before school. What really killed home delivery was the 2 car household. Once wives had cars, home delivery died.

Chimney sweep, wash room attendant, horse sweep, coal man, beverage delivery (beer, soda, seltzer ) gas station attendants, theater ushers, doctors who made house calls, Street ride vendors who would have a circular carni ride on a truck and drive around street to street stopping to get the neighborhood kids to have abride (n circa 1955- 1965)*

Being a milkman was often a first job for a family man, even in the sixties and seventies. My father did it for a while right after I was born, and another friend did it between teaching jobs. It was not necessarily just because of a lack of refrigeration. The milk often came from small, local dairies, who serviced certain areas or a small client list. Our milk came from a small farm that belonged to my stepfather's second cousin. I'm not sure how much of our city they serviced, but I'm pretty sure our school district was using a different dairy, and I know of at least one other that was providing milk to the city. We didn't have large conglomerates milking thousands of cows back then, or even co-ops, banding together small dairies. The cousin's farm milked about 70 cows at the time. I'm not sure how much of the city they were servicing, but I know of at least two other farms that were delivering. What killed it wasn't refrigeration, it was the oil crises of the seventies. Overnight, gas prices when up so much that these farms couldn't keep their fleets going. They were having to raise prices so much that people just started cancelling their subscriptions and getting their milk at the grocery store. The cousin's farm made a power move at this point, and started opening convenience stores which ballooned into a chain very quickly. They are now a national brand. One of the others went to selling milk in bags with pitchers, at an outlet on their farm. We bought from them for a while, because milk was cheaper in bags. Most dairies had shut down deliveries by the end of the seventies. Keep in mind, too, that it wasn't only dairies that delivered. There was the bread truck, the ice cream truck, the egg man, the butcher's truck, etc. Very little was bought at the grocery store. My babysitter's husband worked for a butcher delivering meat to neighborhoods all over the area. Baltimore had "street arabs" who delivered produce all over the city with ponies pulling produce wagons, and that lasted up into the nineties. What killed most of this was women entering the labor force. When there is no one at home all day, how do you deliver fresh food? I saw an article in the Baltimore Sun ten years ago that said there were a handful of street arabs still trying to make a living, but the city had collapsed and he had to walk 20 miles a day to make a living, where a few blocks would have been enough ten years earlier. Most of the houses downtown are abandoned now, and there is no one left to sell to.

I had a great aunt who was an elevator operator for a downtown department store and my mom was a telephone operator in the early 70s.

Back In The Days when America Was respectable.

I worked in our company's headquarters building in the 1960's, which had elevator operators. An important feature, I don't think duplicated by modern elevators, is when a company executive entered a card the operator quietly pressed the non-stop button so the elevator no longer responded to calls to stop and any further floors. To be sure the operators recognized the executives they had photos of the executives posted in the operators' lounge.

I had a coworker that was an Army teletype technician.

The old kitchen thing i remember was top quality, backyard cultivated vegetables, eggs, milk and meat. We eat trash nowdays.

My grandfather used to be a pin setter. The bowling pin kind, not the railroad kind

Fascinating, good old days of kindness and service, with a strong emphasis on politeness and respect for others (what the hell has happened, how did everything turned so bad).

When I was in grade school in the early 1950s my grandmother had an insulated metal box on the front porch for the milk delivery. Also had eggs delivered. The man would open the front door, yell 'egg man' then walk to the refrigerator and put them in.

There are a few elevator operators left, for the iron-cage elevators. One place is Green Apartments in Pasadena CA. You ring the doorbell on the front door, and the operator lets you in (great security) and takes you upstairs. It is a five or six story building built in 1901. Also the Bradbury Office building in Los Angeles has two of these elevators. You can see this building in the film "Blade Runner",

Even in the 90’s I had milk delivery. It was only once a week but the Alta Dena man would deliver in my area of Huntington Beach California. And my friends had it well into the 2000’s. Idk if they still offer it or not.

Just yesterday I mentioned a vegetable man that would cut through the alleys of DC on a particular day and sell veggies. I was probably about 4 or 5 yo, but I remember feeling sorry for him because not many people were home to buy his veggies. My great aunt would, which is why I have memory of him. This was probably about 1979-1980. I'm sure in previous years he had more luck.

I also remember as a kid we had the drive thru dairy. You would pull up and they asked what you wanted. It was like milk, eggs, ice cream type stuff. It was great when my mom was on the way home from work if we just needed milk it was quicker to stop there than the supermarket.

In the late 1950s early 1960s, my younger brother and I worked as pin boys at a local bowling alley. Little brother got more tips than me, because he was very fast. We thought we were rich, when going home with ten dollars !

I sold shoes at Sears fir mybfutst job, ca. 1970. I measured feet, brought out the desired shoes from shelves in a backroom, and fitted them to the customer. No self-service shoe sales then.

I remember when milk trucks went from ice chunks to refrigeration. We were disappointed because we'd snatch ice chunks when the milkman was busy😊

Get with it ! Those 'Human Computers' used 'Cellular Mass Data Bases & Carbon Based Periferals' - not mere paper, pencils and ink : )

Did earn some pocket money as a pin boy in the late 50s and early 60s. Very hard work, as the bowlers were very inpatient, so there was always pressure to get the pins up aspa !!!

I certainly remember milk being delivered to our home, probably twice a week, when I was growing up in the 60's. The milkman would leave it in a small aluminum box by the backdoor that was specifically for that purpose. I think it would hold 4 quart bottles. Then of course, if Mom had any special orders for the next delivery she would just fill out the little order form and leave it in the box. I can't honestly remember when the service stopped, my guess would be some time between 69 and 71. It certainly seemed to be a much simpler time back then but that was probably due to being a little kid in a small town and not really having any worries at all like adults do.

My late mother's husband was both a pin setter and an ice man.

The oddest job I ever had was cutting fabric for shrunken apple head dolls.

In the fifties I remember the milk man used to come around. I also remember we had a guy who used to come around in a horse and wagon to pick up the trash. The place where he used to dump all of the trash is now a huge subdivision. In the fifties and early sixties, I also remember we had clotheslines in the back yard. About 1965 we moved to a new house and my father got some pipes and cable to put a clothesline in the backyard. My mom said, "you know what, I think I'm going to get one of those clothes dryers". The pipes sat in a pile the back yard for a year or two and then got pitched.

Milk men still exist in Denver Metro from Royal Crest Dairies, still provide fresh milk, and dairy products of high quality. At least they don't put salt in their milk like grocery stores do now.

How about TV repair. You don't see that anymore.

I think the 50-buildings count is very low if you count manual freight elevators, usually in a separate bank out of sight. Or buildings with manual elevators and no designated operator.

*I'M 70 YEARS OLD AND STILL REMEMBER THE CIGARETTE MACHINES, IT MADE IT A LOT EASIER FER MINORS TO BUY THEM AND USUALLY THEY DISPENSED A BOOK OF MATCHES WITH THEM WITH ADVERTISING ON THEM*

No more TV repairman.

We still have milk deliveries in the UK. The job of milkman STILL exists

I hung out in bowling alleys in my youth, and I would make money by keeping score for evening bowling leagues. I would travel to several bowling centers throughout the week to do that, as some leagues were more lucrative than others, with some not even using scorekeepers at all. Automatic scorekeepers came along right as I was leaving for better work. We kept score using wax pencils on clear plastic sheets. A bright light would reflect from beneath the sheets and would shine the image on a screen above the end of the lanes. These sheets were reusable and almost always carried local advertising. The best eraser for corrections: a filter from a cigarette. And back in those days, those were easy to find, with two ashtrays at each scoring table. (I never smoked, but I still wonder of all that second-hand smoke is going to get me someday. I did this for years.)

I had a co-worker who was a milk delivery guy in the 1950s. Somehow he supported a family of four before deciding he wanted something a little better.

I had a temporary job delivering milk and later, newspapers.

Imagine having a job as an internet influencer.

Delivering newspapers is already obsolete, particularly as newspapers no longer print paper editions, or fired all the staff 😞

My Dad and father-in-law had this job. Dad said bowlers would put a dollar in the hole to give a tip.

I think it was the introduction of waxed milk cartons that made the milkman obsolete. It became cheaper to go to a store and buy milk and the cartons were lighter, easier to carry than the heavy milk bottles that also had to be washed. I remember the sad day we had to tell the milkman that we no longer wanted deliveries. Today "self-service", replacing human contact with automation is, in large part, responsible for the "Karen" phenomena. Back in the day, service was provided by friendly faces that were almost part of the family. You knew the milkman, the mailman, etc. by name. (And yes, they were inevitably men.) Also gone are gas station attendents. You didn't pump your own gas, a guy (yes, a guy) did it for you, and also cleaned your windshield (windshield sprayers weren't common) and there was the always the offer, to check the oil dipstick as an added courtesy. You wouldn't dream of screaming at these people or disrespecting them because then you'd have to confront them every day and be reminded what an a--hole you'd been with your outburst.

My grandfather delivered ice for ice boxes when my mom was a little girl.

We had a milkman when I was a kid.

Pencil and paper what’s that?😂

howdy, howdy

Had a good friend who was a milk man I pumped gas at a gas station