Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Finding a job in the current economy isn’t always the easiest thing, even if you aren’t a writer. There are some jobs that you just won’t find anymore, no matter how hard you look.

For instance, you won’t be finding any listings for a Resurrectionist in the want ads. Just like sanitation engineer is a euphemism for garbage collector, resurrectionist was the 1800’s euphemism for a grave robber. Yes, the job was illegal even then, but it paid well and there was a pretty steady demand for cadavers for medical or scientific research. Of course, not all of those bodies would have gone for such elevated endeavors, it appears that some of them may have been destined to undergo “mummification”, or a crude alternative, and be sold to the Egypt-mad populace as curios.

Another time honored job you don’t see in Europe or the United States anymore is the rat-catcher. Once pretty much every village had one, but sanitary sewers, landfills, and those pesky sanitation engineers seem to have cut down the population of feral rats. It is also a lot more economical to deal with the remaining problems with chunks of poisoned bait than it is to actually pay someone to spend their nights hunting rats. Not such a great loss, I suppose, I can’t think of anyone that I know that actually aspired to be a rat catcher, but I will miss the whole Pied Piper theme.

How about a more modern one? I’d never even heard of a Bowling Pin Setter before, but it used to be an actual job. Naturally, this was before the advent of automated pin setting machines, and child labor laws, but at one time kids actually stayed at the far end of every lane, and manually reset all of the pins each round.

Then there was the infamous “Knocker-Upper”. No, no matter what it sounds like, it was not this man’s job to ensure the cradles were full. Really he was a human alarm clock armed with a long stick and a big voice. His job was to make sure you got up in time to be at work, generally shift work in a factory, by banging on your window and shouting really loudly. This was far more common in apartment dense city blocks, of course, and makes you wonder how the neighbors that didn’t have the 4 AM shift felt about it.

My personal favorite, though, is the Lector. Sure factory work was tedious, the shifts were long, and the pay wasn’t that great. Many factories found that their production improved when the employees were at least somewhat entertained, so they hired professional Lectors. Unlike the famous face-eating psychiatrist, these were professional readers that kept the worker’s minds occupied with literature while their fingers were busy assembling whatever widgets the factory needed made. These guys were replaced by radio and podcasts, of course, but I love the idea of bringing real literature to the factory workers.

Cheers,

Michelle