This is a follow-up essay to an earlier piece called “Jobless Nostalgia.” Before we get to the heart of the subject, every reader should know that a new table and a new chair are being used for this monumental work of essay writing.
Earlier this year, Miss Chicka decided that my office chair, which had provided me with superior service for about 20 years, needed to be replaced. You will note that Miss Chicka made this fateful determination.
The new chair is an Aeron, made by Herman Miller and has more handles and adjustments than my Chrysler car. It is a mind boggling exercise to describe what this chair can do – so this ancient writer will not even try. But the new chair has one failing. When it is in the operating mode and is pulled up to my desk, there is not enough room for my upper legs between the chair seat and the desk. Apparently, the designers at Herman Miller designed the multiple position chair to be used with modern desks which have no middle drawer or a very skinny middle drawer. The chair is a work of modern art, but it is basically unusable at my desk.
Trips to the local hospital provided an answer. When hospital patients are served a meal, there is a device called an overbed table. It might be called a block “C”– shaped table. The bottom part of the “C” is shoved under the patient’s bed. The top part of the block “C” is a table which is capable of being raised or lowered or it can be tilted for reading. So we bought one.
The saving grace is that the user of the Aeron chair can use the overbed table without having to worry about whether his upper leg will fit between the seat of the chair and the table. And, the tabletop is adjustable to many heights to accommodate near-sighted writers as well as for those who can write at a great distance from their noses.
All of this is being pointed out as a means of explaining unforeseen and inexplicable errors and other proof reading mistakes in this work.
Now this essay is the result of a suggestion of Miss Chicka. In an earlier essay called, “Jobless Nostalgia,” there were lamentations for jobs and occupations that no longer exist such as elevator operators, draftsmen or telephone operators. The point Miss Chicka was making is that when jobs disappear, the person who assumes responsibility for the task is you and me. Let me give you some examples.
Let’s take a call to a doctor’s office. In former days, doctors had a receptionist or a nurse to answer calls from patients. Ah, but those days are long gone now. A call today is not answered by a human voice. Instead, a recorded announcement commands the patient-caller to perform certain tasks before the personnel in the doctor’s office will take the call.
Typical questions are these:
Do you want an appointment for today? Press 1
Do you want a future appointment? Press 2
Is this an emergency? Press 3
Do you need a prescription? Press 4
Do you need to have your current prescription extended? Press 5
If you do not understand these inquires and wish to speak to a doctor’s
representative, press 6 or wait for an operator.
In days gone by, the receptionist or the nurse would answer the call and make appropriate arrangements. Not so today. Listening to the spiel about “press 1” and “press 2” takes many minutes and from time to time, the patient will say, “To hell with all this garbage” and hang up.
But the overwhelming point is that the patient is doing the work of the receptionist or the nurse. What could have been settled in a one minute call now takes several minutes and in the end, it is necessary often, after all the numbers are pressed, to talk to the doctor’s representative in any case. Is this an advance? Does it promote better doctor-patient understanding? On all accounts, the answer has to be NO!
In recent months, there were occasions to call investment firms to inquire about direct deposit of dividends as opposed to mailing the dividends to me each month. As a general rule, investment firms are quite anxious to have an electronic transfer rather than using the postal system. In my case, there were many hurdles to deal with. When the first “press 1” and “press 2” were accomplished, the call then went to the next stage where there were additional “press 1” and “press 6” buttons to push, before the second hurdle was completed. There was now a third one to deal with. And in the end, it was necessary to deal with a supercilious representative of the investment firm. All this took about 20 minutes to deal with a simple request: send my dividend checks electronically rather than by the U.S. Postal System. But in the end, the burden of doing the investment company’s work fell on me. If this is progress, take me back to the 1940s. And we haven’t considered firms that offer the “press 1” and “press 2” to hear the selections in Spanish or, in Canada, in French or English.
Closely allied to the “press 1” and “press 2” problem, is the telephone system. In its early days, all phones were manual. If you wished to place a call, there was a Central Operator who performed all the necessary functions. These operators knew who was being called and were often full of gossip. They could tell you if you had an incoming call while you were engaged in a separate call. And more than anything else, they provided a human touch to the telephone company. But that was long ago. Today, if you wish to call across the street, there is usually the necessity to dial a “1” followed by a three digit area code followed by a seven digit local code. The requirement to dial “1” followed by the area code is a development that has come about in the last few years. But no matter how you cut it, the customer is doing the work that used to be performed by a telephone company employee. And all of this is a matter of “progress”? Many of us who remember when service was really provided are pretty dubious as to the claim of progress.
When a call is placed to a phone belonging to a company very often the call is referred to a remote voice box, which permits company employees to answer at their leisure. More than anything else, this is primarily a device to keep labor costs as low as possible. Not long ago, calls to a company location were answered by a real employee who could deal with the subject at hand. Not any longer. When a call is transferred to a voice box, the customer-caller is obliged to explain his problem to an electronic device that asks no questions as a human would do. Once again, the customer is doing someone else’s work while the employer enjoys the reduced payroll.
Closely allied is the banking industry. Banks now seem intent upon getting rid of tellers and using ATM’s in their place. Perhaps, modern bankers denigrate the human touch that a teller can offer. It is obvious, that an ATM is not going to ask, “How are you today?” or “Good to see you again.” In any case, bankers want you to do the teller function and the small talk is simply an arcane memory of the past. On-line banking takes it a step further.
When it comes to small talk or advice about one product over another, there is no better example than grocery stores. My memory goes back to the late 1920’s and the depression years of the 1930’s. My mother patronized Gualdoni’s grocery store located just south of “Dead Man’s curve” on North and South Road in Brentwood, Missouri. The sharp bend in the two lane roadway on a steep hill which produced several serious motor vehicle accidents per year, was called “Dead Man’s Curve” for a very good reason.
At Gualdoni’s there was a long counter. Bob and Lou and John Gualdoni stood behind the counter. Behind them was the stock. Corn flakes, for example, were stacked at the top of the other packaged goods. They may have been eight or nine feet above ground level. When a customer ordered corn flakes – Kellogg’s, of course – one of the three clerks would take a long pole with a grappling device on the far end and pick out a package of corn flakes. Bob and Lou were in their 20’s. They often dislodged the corn flakes and would catch it on the way down.
In the meantime, the customer would stand on the other side of the counter with a grocery list. When all the items to be brought were assembled on the counter, the clerks would write down the cost on a brown grocery bag, and would then add up the total. There were no calculators then or even adding machines. Each column was added and the carryover was written at the head of the next column of figures.
While the groceries were being assembled, John or Bob or Lou might say, “We’ve got some strawberries that would be good with those cornflakes.” In a way it was salesmanship, but in another way it was a grocery man being helpful.
Boy, has all that changed. Clerks are hard to find in today’s grocery stores. The customers wanders up and down the aisles and throws things into his grocery cart. There is no small talk, and certainly, no helpful suggestions. If the customer fails to see the special on strawberries, he or she will be forced to eat his cornflakes strawberry-less. In the final analysis, the customer is performing the duties of the clerks who have never been hired by the owners of the grocery chain or store.
But from all appearances, we ain’t seen nothing yet. In the bright new world of tomorrow, the check-out clerks are eliminated. Each item has a bar code. The customer takes the bar coded item to a machine and passes it over a reading device. A total is then produced which the faceless customer pays using his/her credit or debit card. This is similar to the transaction at a self-serve gasoline station where you pump your own gas and pay your own bill. Grocery shopping tomorrow will be an experience almost completely devoid of any human contact. The customer is responsible for the function formerly performed by clerks. While we moan at doing someone else’s work, the grocery owners have retired to the back rooms to count the extra profits from the non-hiring of clerks. Everyone knows that the grocery business is a competitive affair, but a little human contact might make it a more pleasant experience.
This is not a complete list of functions that require customers to perform the work formerly performed by clerks, telephone operators, nurses, receptionists, etc. A complete list might involve more functions than the reader is willing to deal with. In leaving this subject of all of us performing jobs formerly performed by others, if we go back in time, there may be a bright side to this whole proposition. When many of us were youngsters, coal was brought to our homes in the winter months. There was no gas or oil heat. Delivering coal was a filthy job. Shoveling it from the coal bin into the furnace was a job that required old clothes. Taking out the ashes after the coal had burned was an unpleasant job. Gas or oil heat is a more pleasant way to heat our homes and a good bit cleaner as well.
In the summer, before refrigerators were commonplace, ice men came each day except Sunday. A 12 or 15 inch card was placed in a window facing the street. The top of the card had an entry for 25. If the card was turned on one side it read 50. If the card was turned the other way, it read 75. If the card was placed upside down, it read 100. The numbers were the pounds of ice that the ice man was to deliver for use in an ice box.
In St. Louis and its suburbs, the predominate furnisher of coal and ice was the Polar Wave Company. Delivery men who worked for Polar Wave were hardworking fellows. Statistics are unavailable of course, but it must be assumed that men who delivered coal and ice had a short life expectancy. But the point is clear that heating homes and having refrigerators rather than an ice box are more civilized today than they were in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
My informants – some of whom are reliable – tell me that Polar Wave is still in business and is a profitable company. They should be applauded for making the transition to modern times.
There is one other occupation that is included here because of a sense of nostalgia. The job was a sharpener of knives and scissors and other cutting devices. In the 1930’s, there were men who drove small pickup trucks with a large whetstone in the back. The whetstone was mounted on the truck bed and was turned very much the way a bicycle is propelled. When the sharpener had a customer from ringing his bell, he would leave the cab of the truck and climb into the rear of the truck. Seated on a seat, he would then pump to turn the whetstone.
Memory tells me that knife sharpeners were generally Italian immigrants. They were hard working people in an occupation that offered no long term benefits. Today, these men are gone. In their place, we have electric devices that sharpen both sides of a knife whereas the whetstone sharpened only one side at a time. Certainly, the electric sharpeners of today are a great improvement, but for many of us, the ringing of the bell that told us the knife sharpener was on our street brings back a sense of considerable nostalgia. On top of that, when the immigrant sharpeners told you of their home towns in Italy, it provided a geography lesson as well.
This little essay about lost jobs must end with a sense of romance. For nearly 30 years, it has been my pleasure to know two Swedish citizens through their association with Televerket, the Swedish international telecommunications firm. My friends are Ella and Sven Lernevall. Sven and your essayist are about the same age. In order to advance himself, Sven left his hometown of Umeå in Northern Sweden which is located on the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia. Sven soon found work in Stockholm as a radio telegraph operator deciphering dispatches from other countries. At the time in the 1940’s, people in the United States who wished to send a radio dispatch to Sweden used the services of RCA. Calling by telephone was still several years off.
Now for the romance part of this story. In 1945, Sven met Ella who also was a radio telegraph operator. According to natives of Sweden, it is very difficult to pronounce the name of Umeå, Sven’s hometown. Somewhere along the line in 1945, Dr. Lernevall heard Ella pronunce Umeå properly and elegantly. There is no need for me to tell you that romance followed and Ella and Sven married.
As time went forward, telecommunications advances rendered the radio telegraph operator as an obsolete occupation. Before that happened, Ella and Sven had a happy marriage and Sven was promoted several times in the Swedish Telecommunications Authority.
So there you are. In spite of all of us performing functions that were formerly performed by others, your old essayist brings cheer to a dismal situation by reciting the story of the romance by Ella and Sven Lernevall, natives of Sweden. Not all stories of lost jobs end as uplifting as the Lernevall story, but there is some sort of hope. In the meantime, my efforts will go toward pronouncing Umeå in a fashion that even King Gustav would approve of. In exchange, perhaps, His Majesty might try pronouncing the name of four towns in my home state of Missouri. They are Tallapoosa and Braggadocio in the Boot Heel of Missouri, and in Johnson County, Chilhowee and my favorite, Knob Knoster. If they are pronounced correctly, Sven and Ella would be appointed the Duke and Duchess of Knob Knoster, in the Show Me state, an achievement of unparalleled significance. Even though the pay is at the poverty level and they would be forced to use a 1939 Essex Motor car for ceremonial occasions, most socialites would die for these honors. It is a certainty that Knob Knosterettes will come to love and revere their new Swedish royalty. (A map of Missouri, The Show Me state, is included here.)
E. E. CARR
June 12, 2004
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“Objections to Modernity” has to be one of my favorite labels. I might even like it more than “Favorite,” which I guess is a little ironic.
I love self checkout machines. I live right by a Safeway so I generally only buy a handful of items at a time, so my choice is to either wait ten minutes for a checkout counter to open up or just scan a few items myself and be on my way. Plus, since I’m currently a product manager on point of sale systems, I love seeing how different companies implement self checkout. Spoiler alert: they still do this badly, because 2 of the 6 registers at my safeway are dependably out of order. Never the same two, mind you. This is what happens when you do a shoddy job of client-proofing your machines.
I get what Pop is going for here, that the lack of people in these service jobs makes people more isolated and reduces social interactions, and that’s a valid point. On the other hand, I think it’s pretty strictly a good thing that nobody has to deliver milk and ice every day, and that every human in the world with a cell phone can pretty much call any other human in the world with a cell phone without having to go through yet another human to route the call, which obviously wouldn’t have ever possibly scaled to the globe’s current call volume. Similarly most gains in automation are going to free people up to do work that they find more satisfying to them, in a future where we move away from the idea that everyone needs a 9-to-5 that provides gainful employment. That’s just not a rational endgame here.
And who knows? Maybe once the general population isn’t so heads down at work for 40 hours a week, they can go out and socialize more, or maybe they’ll hang out at grocery stores and recommend good food combinations to passerby for the fun of it. I think you can use retired people as sort of a model here — once you don’t have a full time job, you definitely get out a lot more.