By Max Fawcett Illustrations by Colin Spence
One of the more popular hobbies for today’s journalist is musing about the dismal state of their industry. The relentless string of job cuts, corporate bankruptcies, and online-only transitions – a term that is still, sadly, a professional euphemism for failure in the media universe – have conspired to make journalists, already a naturally pessimistic lot, downright morbid.
But cheer up, ink-stained wretches, because while the professional prospects of a journalist might not look great today they’re still infinitely better than those of an elevator operator, a typewriter repairman or any of these other long-dead careers. Misery, meet your company!
Elevator Operator
The unwritten rules for riding in an elevator in 2010 aren’t much different from those that govern the use of a urinal in a public men’s washroom: stare straight ahead, say nothing and avoid eye contact at all costs. Sixty years ago, though, the elevator ride was an invitation to interaction, a social experience supervised by the lift’s operator who was, in addition to being responsible for the operation and safety of the lift, expected to provide an empowering mixture of small talk and deference to passengers. In department stores, for example, the elevator operator was essentially a better dressed and mannered version of the people who work at today’s information desks, tasked with providing customers with both directions and news about the sales and specials that the store was promoting.
The job peaked in popularity in 1951, when 3,898 lift operators, almost all of them men, toiled insde these moving offices. Times have changed though and as of the 2006 census, there were no recorded elevator operators working in Canada. There are still a few elevator operators in the western world, although their jobs are more a function of nostalgia than necessity. The Pioneer Building in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the city hall in Buffalo, New York, are two places that employ professional elevator operators, while the lifts at tourist attractions like Seattle’s Space Needle and the Eiffel Tower in Paris still require the steady hand of a professional.
Cooper 
In 2010 a cooper might be more commonly associated with the pint-sized British car or the family of Kevin Arnold’s on-again, off-again girlfriend on the Wonder Years, but a century ago it referred to the people who built barrels. And while the citizen of 2010 might think that barrels are only used as alternatives to clothing during depression years or projectiles to be hurled by princess-stealing cartoon gorillas at meddlesome Italian plumbers, they used to be a valuable commodity. Before the development of metal and plastic-based alternatives, barrels were used to contain and ship a wide variety of goods, from dry goods to gun powder and liquor. Coopers were responsible for building and maintaining the barrel, one of the lynchpins of the 19th century economy, and their numbers peaked accordingly.
The barrel isn’t completely obsolete in 2010 as vintners and distillers still use high-end versions to store and age their finer products. Still, it’s not nearly enough to sustain an industry that employed over 2,000 people as recently as 1911.
Lamplighters
The only place you’ll find a lamplighter these days is at a recreated heritage town tourist attraction or at the annual Burning Man Festival. But in the days before electric and gas lighting were widely available, the lamplighter was a respected public servant in every town and city in the civilized world. The lamplighter’s job was to light and extinguish the street lights, which were large oil candles raised up on posts or in perches, each and every day. When he was lighting or extinguishing these candles the town lamplighter could be found up a ladder renewing or repairing them. Early gas lights required the lamplighter’s services, but eventually the job was rendered obsolete. One can only hope that the same will be said one day about Burning Man.
Switchboard Operator
Given the time and effort that it takes to reach a real, living, human operator these days, it’s tempting to think that there may only be, in fact, one operator. Something as simple as dialing directory assistance has become about as pleasant as a trip to the dentist’s office, and the costs associated with it aren’t far off either. But it wasn’t long ago that the telephone operator was a position of respect and earned authority, a job that required both a soft touch with people and Patton-esque organizational skills. Switchboard operators, as they were then known, were important intermediaries between people trying to get in touch, and their phone-side manner would make today’s cold and impersonal computer algorithms feel shame, were they capable of it.
Today, this unique skill-set lives on at the reception areas of the average office, where underpaid and overworked administrative assistants direct the telephonic traffic. That is, of course, until they too are replaced by an aggravatingly inefficient computer program.
Circling the Dead Pool
Travel Agent
Online booking tools and low-fare search sites like Expedia and Travelocity have been to travel agencies what iTunes has been to record stores, a swift technological kick in the nether regions. But while the services of travel agents are no longer needed to book that ticket from Calgary to Vancouver or even that Mexican all-inclusive winter getaway, there is a sector of the market in which they’re not yet totally obsolete. High-end travel arrangements, be it globetrotting world tours or destination specific planning, are still areas in which a talented travel agent enjoys a significant advantage over his or her online competitors.
Music Store Employee 
If video killed the radio star then the internet laid an old fashioned ass-whooping on the music store. Gone are the A&B Sounds, the Sam the Record Mans and other musical meccas that were a favoured hangout for music fans and loitering teenagers alike. These big stores become a near casualty of the digital revolution and the rise of iTunes and less reputable file peers in the file sharing universe like Limewire and Napster, and those that survived did so by simultaneously expanding their range of products and reducing the complement of staff available to sell them. The result is a bastardized version of the high-quality musical feedlots of yester year, ones where Justin Bieber and Nickleback qualify as talented musicians and the music of bands like the Talking Heads and the Pretenders is stored in the oldies section.
There is hope for music geeks, though, and it comes (as all things seem to these days) in micro-markets and hyper-specialization. By catering to a small but fiercely loyal clientele, small music stores operating with low overheads are capable of eking out an existence.
Journalist
Given the state of the industry right now, a convocation ceremony at the average journalism school in Canada must be an exercise in mixed emotions. After all, given the death spiral in which the industry seems to be locked of late, the prospects of these newly matriculated – and indebted – professionals must seem about as good as those of a professional zeppelin pilot in 1938. With the rise of online journalism and the subsequent erosion of the traditional monopoly that the professional media has enjoyed since the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago, journalists face a future in which they may not be needed nor wanted.
But it’s far from certain that the ink-stained wretch will go the way of the town crier. The industry’s biggest brains are squarely focused on the existential challenge that they face, and they’ve made some progress towards resolving it. Publications are beginning to embrace the internet as something other than a nuisance, and there have even been murmurs about the potential for profitability in the online world. We’re not dead yet, folks.
Category: Work
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