Extinct Jobs

[evadora]

When I was younger I worked as a bus Conductress for London Transport at South Croydon Bus Garage on the 68 bus from South Croydon to Chalk Farm in North London. Then the one man operator buses came about and I was transferred to Thornton Heath Garage on the 109 bus to Blackfriars and the Embankment. Eventually I transferred to an office job at Head Office at Broadway (opposite Scotland Yard). You very rarely see a conductor on the bus now, an almost extinct job. I loved my days as a Clippie!! and have wonderful memories of those days. Has anyone else got memories of a job that is no longer about??

[paddywak]

Nearly 30 years as a sparky in the pits working everywhere from the winders to the coal face. The conditions could be terrible and dangerous,I spent 6 months in hospital after an argument with a haulage chain, and was considered lucky to have got away with it. Most men who spent any time in the pits had lost family and friends to the job,despite this I've never met or worked with a better bunch of men and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

[Smowball]

My friends husband does a job which I’m sure will be soon to be extinct - he actually weaves/threads the ropes for church bells. It was taught to him by his dad, and him by his dad etc………..Apparently it can take years to perfect it.

[windywillow]

I was a Directory Enquiry operator in the days when you had to look up numbers using a paper phone book.

[Buenchico]

WindyWillow's reference to Directory Enquiries indirectly reminds me that I used to deliver Thomson Local directories, which ceased publication in 2016.

I also supervised the distribution of Yellow Pages across a large part of East Anglia for several years, as well as delivering some directories myself; the final editions of Yellow Pages were distributed at the start of 2019.

I've also delivered the BT Phone Book to thousands of addresses. That's still going strong - but for how much longer I wonder?

Much of the traffic counting work I've done in the past has now been automated, with cameras and computers replacing people sitting in their cars (or standing on street corners) with clipboards, noting down which type of vehicles are going in particular directions.

Going back to my student days, I did a vacation job as punch card operator.

I also worked for John Players manually processing employees' wages and tax liabilities. (I can't believe that there are many firms, certainly not major ones, who haven't adopted Sage or similar by now!).

[DTCwordfan]

Bottom Hole Samplers - and not another term for proctologist - it used to be a role in Exploration and Drilling measuring pressures up and down the well and from which they use the data to determine flow and life of wells - all instrumentation and electronics now.

[Patsy33]

When I left school at 15, I was a punch card operator, in Data Processing, on the old IBM verifier machine.

[Buenchico]

I learned how to use a key punch machine (albeit very slowly) when studying computing at college, Patsy. Once we'd written a program, we had to get it onto punch cards and then postl them to the polytechnic (because the college didn't have its own computer). We'd then have to wait several days until the computer operators found the time to run programs that we lowly college students had sent to them, before getting the results mailed back to us (usually showing that, due to a single mis-keyed card, our program wouldn't run properly and we'd have to start all over again!).

Things got a lot better the following year though when we moved onto to punched tape. Then all we had to do, after getting the punching done, was to wait until the only time in the evening that our college had access to the poly's computer, phone them up and get the phones at each end inserted into the data cradles. Then we could actually send our data direct to the computer. Wow! What progress!

Oh, happy days ;-)

[zebo]

//We used to have deliveries made by horse and cart - but I can't remember the item. Coal, milk or even bread perhaps?//

I recall the coalman having a horse and cart, also the rag'n'boneman, I also remember my Dad going out there with a bucket and spade to collect the 'droppings' for the garden. Even now if we see where the horse have been one of us will usually say Where's Dad?

[Patsy33]

Buen, fancy that!
Can't say I enjoyed it :-)

[tonyav]

In my early years at work some of the automatic machines were run by a punch card.

[Patsy33]

It's all progressed a bit from back then, Tone :-)

[jno]

we don't see the night soilmen around much any more, zebo. No wonder the place is getting a bit smelly...

[tonyav]

Patsy33It's all progressed a bit from back then, Tone :-)

I know, Patsy. I've watched it happen.

[Smowball]

I didn’t even realise that they’d stopped delivering the Thomson Local …

[Buenchico]

When did you last actually look anything up in a Thomson Local directory though, Smow?

Just like Yellow Pages, the end came about because everyone uses the internet these days.

When I first started working for Deya Ltd (which was the company who had the contract to deliver Yellow Pages across the country), Yellow Pages were massive, thick encyclopaedia-like volumes that had to be handed over to householders because they were way too thick to go through any letterbox. By the end they'd become ultra-slim books, like novellas, which would easily fit into the narrowest of letterboxes, simply because nobody was advertising in them any longer.