Elliott Morgan hosts this week’s mental_floss video, in which we hear about jobs that no longer exist. Most of them are jobs that you wouldn’t want to do, anyway, done away with by the miracles of electricity, plumbing, and mechanization. There are more occupations joining these every day. I had to explain to my kids why anyone would ever need a “typist.” They also discovered a new occupation when we visited Idaho, because they’d never seen a “cobbler” before. Still, they know of some obsolete jobs, as their grandma spent decades as a "local telephone operator." Her stories of those days never made much sense to the kids, but they are aware of them.
For them, we still need people to type.