The butcher? The baker?
The candlestick maker?
Who gives a tinker's damn?
by Robert Davis
In one of those End of Millennium lists that popped up last year, Johannes Gutenberg was named by a group of 1,000 top scholars as the most important man of the last 1,000 years because he changed the world with his invention of movable type and the printing press. Good news for Johannes, supposedly. But, as always, good news was tempered with bad. For if Gutenberg were still plying his craft as the new millennium dawns, there is a very good chance the German printer would be out of work, with no good job prospects in sight.
It has become a modern clichˇ in commencement speeches for solemn-faced speakers to tell fresh-faced graduates that 10 years from that date they'll probably have jobs that don't yet exist. What the speakers don't say, however, is that the jobs that do exist on that date may not exist in 10 years either.
Granted, computer science has revolutionized the world of work, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year to replace those that are lost. Just a decade or two ago, a Webmaster, say, was more likely to be encountered by readers of sci-fi literature than readers of the Dow Jones Industrial Average tables. Yet in another of those millennium-ending lists, the top-growing jobs of the near future were computer engineers, computer support specialists, systems analysts and database administrators. At the bottom were typesetters (‡ la Gutenberg), railroad brakemen, telephone installers and housekeepers.
If those bottom-of-the-list jobs are going fast, some are already gone.
In the 1950s, for example, a visit by the television repairman to mend that ailing black-and-white behemoth in the living room was highly anticipated by the entire family. Nowadays, a broken television set means a trip to the alley garbage pail followed by a trip to the store. But even computer repairers are fast disappearing, because it's cheaper to buy a new computer than to fix the old one.
Lots of occupations are disappearing altogether. Or changing beyond recognition.
The door-to-door salesman, for instance, including the legendary Fuller Brush Man, is now doing e-business, and doing quite nicely, too. Even religious evangelists, who used to inspire people to draw their blinds and lie on the floor until they went away, are now saving souls on the World Wide Web,
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spreading the words of Jesus through a 56K modem.
Meanwhile, persistent encyclopedia salesmen, including those for Britannica, aren't around anymore; the company is giving the thing away on the Internet.
And there's more. Milkmen are so rare these days that when a company offers door-to-door delivery, it merits a big feature in the local newspaper, as though an idea so common a half century ago were new and revolutionary. Maybe it is. Nowadays, the only things delivered to the door regularly are newspapers and the mail, and even they are being supplanted by computer screens.
The old, often eccentric, knife sharpener pushing his cart through city neighborhoods still shows up once in awhile, but it's doubtful his apprenticeships are being filled, and he may soon join the ranks of buggy whip manufacturers and blacksmiths.
The venerable old short order cook is being replaced by disinterested teenagers who flip burgers by a computerized buzzer rather than experience. But at least the fast food places are still providing jobs. The days of the young high school kid majoring in shop courses who works part time at the corner gas station have virtually ended.
No more washing the windshields while pumping the gas. Now, it's self-serve, even on the coldest, rainiest days, while the "attendant" sits in a tiny booth behind bulletproof glass waiting for customers to slide bills into the cash tray. And, no, he or she won't check the oil, either.
Film projectionists? Forget it. Movie ushers? Find your own seat. Movie times? "Press One." Butchers? They are all in the back room of the supermarket now, cutting up the meat and prepackaging it in sizes they want.
Bakers? Yes, sir, that fresh hot bread is sitting back in the truck in subfreezing temperatures, waiting for a stockboy to condescend to unload it.
Candlestick makers? Actually, they made out pretty good this year as people stocked up on emergency lighting in case that Y2K bug actually did turn out to be Mothra rather than just another moth. And, as long as there is love and romance, there will always be candles.
On the subject of love and romance, another disappearing occupation is that of porno bookstore operator. There are still a few of those places left, but more and more, the porno bookstore has moved right into the home, flickering on 15-inch computer screens, where men (and presumably some women) don't even have to don dirty old raincoats. Click, click, and there it all is. And if that is a little too seamy for some, the more genteel can go to the new singles bars, known as chat rooms, where they don't have to spend a lot of money on the trendiest clothes; they can just say they're wearing them.
And they don't even have to spend money getting their shoes shined. That is, if they could find a shoeshine person (to use the politically correct term) to polish 'em up.
Change is usually good, but often not from a literary standpoint. There is no way a database administrator would fit into Chattanooga Choo-Choo, when the boy says, "Track 29, and would you care for a shine?" And the meter isn't quite right if that poem reads, "Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village systems analyst stands." But back to the Man of the Millennium. Nice work on the movable type, Johannes, but these days, it's all bits and bytes and electronic 1s and 0s and your services will no longer be required. The romantic noise of newspapers down in the composing and press rooms, where the incredibly loud roar of presses and clanging of Linotype machines was music to the ears of generations of journalists, has been replaced by the hum of computers and an occasional lyrical "You've Got Mail." It is not a place where Johannes Gutenberg would be comfortable, much less welcome. He might have been the Man of That Millennium, but not of The Next One.
But nostalgia is only a hobby for those who have been there, and the newest generation entering the work force will not look back tenderly on things it never knew. Unless, of course, the jobs they hold today don't exist 10 years from now.
Until that happens, though, today's new work force entrants couldn't give a tinker's damn about the jobs that have disappeared.
In fact, they'd be damned if they even knew what a tinker is. Was, that is.
Robert Davis is a former garbageman, retired writer and editor for the Chicago Tribune, and is now a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He got his first full-time job in 1960 and has been working ever since.
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Sam S. Manivong, Illinois Periodicals Online Coordinator Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library |