Obsolete Professions

   In the last 100 years a number of fairly well-paying jobs have come and gone due to incredible advancements in technology, as well as the dramatic decrease in the replacement costs of just about all consumer goods.

It used to be that every neighborhood had at least one fix-it man who could do everything from sharpening mower blades to replacing the burnt-out tubes in a television set.

The need for those people seems to be long past. Just about every appliance that one can own is now fairly cheap - so cheap that it's much easier to simply discard the old one and buy a replacement than it is to have the old one repaired.

How many professions have been created and are now either obsolete or very close to disappearing since the dawn of the assembly line and the concurrent rise in mass-production?

Starting with the obvious, there is the whole army of people who worked in the television and radio repair industry. I imagine there are a number of technicians still working in the field, but a quick google search for "Television Repair" resulted in far more stories about television repair shops closing "...after 50 years in business..." than actual open repair shops, and the open shops were primarily advertising services to mount and hook-up televisions, not actually repair them.

I could also clump VHS player repair technician into the T & R field, but it's probably better to list them separate, with all tape recording machines, video or audio, and throw in DVD repair techs too.

The entirety of the television and radio repair field along with the VHS & DVD repair field, has no doubt been replaced by the computer & cellphone repair field, people who know how to replace which circuit board to get whatever function is no longer functioning, or who can replace little cracked screens.

There does not appear too many elevator operators working these days, though they are seen in just about every other movie that's broadcast on TCM, spiffy uniforms and all.

Telephone operators seem to be a thing of the past, at least those that provided connections for long-distance services or information. Maybe those people all moved on to being 911 operators.

Speaking of long-distance services... at one time the cost of one month's frequent use of long-distance calling cost more than an entire year's worth of cell phone use...and that's not even adjusting the price paid as recently as 30 years ago for inflation.

There are not a lot of film processors around anymore. There was a time when Foto-Mat booths were found in every shopping center or even occupying a small lot all by themselves. Those booths are all gone, along with the workers who made rolls of film, instamatic cameras, dark-room equipment, or did any type of film processing work.

The auteurs of Hollywood, the ones that consider themselves purists (see "audiophile" for further elaboration) are still using film stock to create movies, but by and large all movie making has gone digital, so processing film is a very specialized field now.

Related to the lamented mass-production of film stock, the vinyl album, that audio recording format that evolved from the 78-rpm developed in the early years of the 20th century into the less costly, more durable 33 & 1/3, has all but disappeared except for the small operations that produce albums (usually of a much heavier grain than used in the past) for the audiophile community. Another mass production industry whittled down to a boutique industry.

Theater projectionists are pretty much obsolete now, too. Films are sent to theaters in digital formats that can be programmed in advance for a week's worth of showings, and all it takes to get the films "rolling" is the touch of a button.

The printing industry has created and eliminated thousands and thousands of specialized jobs over the past 100 years. Not a lot of typesetters around anymore, or color-separation techs, or paste-up artists. Though newspapers are still being published, all the pre-production people have been replaced by software and the people who know how to use it.

Bicycle messengers are hard to find these days, though messenger services can be found on the internet. Most of those advertising on the internet seem to be delivery services for hard goods though, not manilla envelope encased messages.

I would be remis if I didn't mention commercial illustration as being an outmoded profession. Long gone are the days when magazines sported paintings of celebrities or politicians or just little bucolic snippets of life in America, and album covers featured phantasmagoric or idyllic imagery (depending on the music genre). Those days died with Norman Rockwell and Rick Griffen (amongst untold thousands of other talented folks). 

It's the masters of photoshop that rule the roost in the commercial art studios these days.

Sign painters should be included in that group too, as well as billboard painters and even the guys who used to hand draw flyers for parties or garage sales. All replaced by what can be done with a computer.