“I still tell people that was the best job I’ve ever had.
“In the mid-’80s, I processed checks for a bank.
Then, I’d whisk it into a stack of already-processed checks.
I’d work on stacks of hundreds of checks, listening to cassette tapes on my Sony Walkman.
“I started working for the telephone company right out of high school.
I worked on the cord board, where you actually connect phone calls with cords.
We announced person-to-person calls and collect calls.
I went on to have a career with the phone company, but my first job was my favorite.
I loved it!”
homeydog257
3.
“For almost all of the ’90s, I worked for a beeper company.
People forget how widely popular those things were.”
“I worked as a photo developer at a chain camera shop.
I fell asleep at the viewer more times than I can count.
I will never forget the smell while cleaning the chemical vats in the machines.
We had no protective gear just gloves up to our elbows.”
shinystar10
5.
“I used to deliver the Yellow Pages.”
“While I was in college in the early 2000s, I worked at a paint store.
Digital paint-matching machines didn’t really exist yet, so I was trained to be a custom color matcher.
People would bring in paint chips from competitors and ask me to make that specific color.
I got quite good.
I think it’s a skill that’s now lost because the color-matching machines have taken over.”
Kate, 43
7.“Blockbuster.
I still tell people that was the best job I’ve ever had.
I got five free rentals a week, including video games, if I wanted.
We could take movies home once we got them in the store, even before they were officially released.
We were actually encouraged to watch the new releases so we could tell customers about them and make recommendations.
It was a super easy and well-paying job for someone in school.”
“Before Apple and computer graphics, I worked as a ‘Paste-Up Artist.’
I created artboards for newspapers and other printed products.
This is where many of the terms used in Adobe products originally came from.”
rich9
9.
It was probably the worst job I’ve ever had.
People told me they were spending money for groceries to ask me to predict the winning lottery numbers.
It was depressing and exploitative.”
“After high school in the ’80s, I worked at a catalog showroom.
Customers would order items after looking at displays and write them up.
donaldhauptmann
11.
“In the 1970s and ’80s, I was a keypunch operator.
I spent all day keying written information into clunky IBM keyboards and creating stacks upon stacks of 80-column cards.
“I spent the summer of 1993 working in a reservation center for a major European airline.
Then, I was put in a huge room full of telephone reservationists.
Sometimes, supervisors would listen in on the calls to ensure we were selling the flights ‘correctly.’
That, and most people book online or through apps.”
gwinevere
13.
“I started out as a secretary.
I am now an ‘Ambassador of First Impressions,’ which is a fancy way of saying administrative assistant.
It’s the same job, sure, but it’s different technology, titles, and terminology.”
“In the late ’90s, I was a 411 operator.”
jodied476babc6e
15.
“I was an editor’s assistant in the early 1990s.
I had to sign them by hand because a stamp looked ‘too impersonal.’
Today, all of this would be done through email.”
Rosalie, 55, California
17.
“I was a paper boy for years.
I would get up at 4 a.m. on Sundays to put the supplement pack into the Sunday broadsheets.
We don’t need any of that anymore, though.”
18.“Collections.
I used to work for the LA Times to collect past-due newspaper subscriptions.
Anonymous
19.
“I worked at Musicland in the early ’90s.
Mind you, this was considered really advanced at the time.
When New Kids On The Block’s new album came out, there was a line out the door.
It was a great job.
I wasn’t a movie buff then, but I learned a lot about cinema.
I still miss walking through the aisles to pick out a movie.
There’s something so special about it that endlessly scrolling through Netflix can’t replace.”
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
