21 Jobs That Disappeared in Our Lifetime: From Ice Men to Secretaries

As technology advances, certain career paths and jobs become obsolete. Some jobs can be replaced with a single computer program (which is becoming more prevalent due to AI), and while change usually takes decades, sometimes these once-common careers vanish within a single lifetime...

That's why when Redditor u/debrisaway asked, "What occupation vanished in your lifetime?" hundreds of adults shared the once-common jobs that have disappeared within their lifetimes. From gas station attendants to secretaries — here are 21 of their most surprising responses:

1. Newspaper delivery person. Back in the '70s, my brother, sister, and I all had paper routes when we were each about 12 years old. I don't know when it changed, but the next thing I knew, it was all adults driving cars delivering the newspaper. Then home delivery dwindled so much that you could only buy the local paper from a machine or a newsstand.

2. Ice man. When I was very young, I can remember the 'ice man' bringing blocks of ice to our house for refrigeration. I was probably about 4 years old when we got an electric refrigerator.

3. Gas station attendant. The person used to pump the gas, wash the windshield, and run the card or take the cash. The days of full service are gone…

4. Travel agents. They technically still exist, but they’ve been decimated by the internet and travel planning sites. My parents used one once when I was a kid, and I remember there being an organization that had offices in the mall, but I haven’t seen one since the late 2000s.

5. Phone book deliverer. I worked with someone whose family used to deliver phone books. She was homeschooled and would do schoolwork in the van while her mom drove around and delivered the phone books.

6. Television/radio/small appliance repair person. Almost every town used to have a 'fix it' shop where you'd take televisions, can openers, toasters, etc., to get them repaired if they stopped working. Now it's usually cheaper to buy a new one.

7. Elevator operator. When I was around 5 years old, my next-door neighbor was an elevator operator. He sat on a stool in the elevator all day and operated the control that took you between floors. When you got on the elevator, you told him which floor you wanted to get off at, and he'd drive you there.

8. Receptionists who only answered the phone all day. I did that at two companies in the '90s, and I didn't even have a computer to play on. Later, the position was called admin assistant, and I had to learn Excel and do reports. I had fewer phone calls because people were getting voicemail on their office phones.

9. Special Messenger. My first job was a 'Special Messenger' at a large insurance company. It was a 12-story building, and if I remember correctly, there were 12 of us. We would spend the entire day running important messages all over the building, kind of like a human combo of a fax machine and email. It really was probably the most fun job I've ever had. We got into some shenanigans while out running around.

10. Shoemaking. Recently, I was looking at old high school yearbooks from the 1940s-1950s, and was amazed at how robust shoemaking was. All the equipment, the shoes students would bring to be repaired, and how many students were in the club.

11. Newspaper graphics artists used to draw maps and charts by hand. When I worked at a paper, the senior artists hand-drew visuals, and the younger artists did them digitally. Eventually, they went all digital. I still remember one newspaper that still physically laid out the paper when everyone else was already using Quark.

12. Photolabs, from the one-hour places that were everywhere to the professional places, and photo retouchers, not the ones with Photoshop, but the ones who used tiny brushes and magnifiers. Yes, there are some photogs using film and places that will process it, but from there it's all back to digital, they will scan the film, not project manually to paper. Printing is nearly 100% digital.

13. Key punch operator. When I was a kid, my dad was a programmer and occasionally had to take my brother and me with him when he had to go in on a Saturday. He would let me play with the key punch machine, and I thought it was great, so much so that I wanted to be a key punch operator when I grew up.

14. Cigarette vending machine business. My father had a cigarette vending machine business. In his day, one of his employees put 2 cents change in between a double pack because it was 2 for 23 cents. When he was a kid, he set pins in a bowling alley before automation. Unlike today, no one complained about losing those jobs; they just went to the next crappy job.

15. Medical transcriptionist. That's what I did until they made EVR (electronic voice recording) mandatory. Now they've moved on to doctors recording their own notes via computer. My inner transcriptionist shudders to think of the amount of errors being recorded.

16. Switchboard answering services. I used to work nights answering doctors' calls from hospitals and patients. During the day, I took messages for businesses closed for lunch.

17. Bank clerks. I think bank clerks were the first casualty of computerization. I don't mean the tellers, nor the loan officers (they're on the way out now, too), but the bookkeeping accounts clerks. When I was a kid, selling YMCA butter toffee peanuts to go to summer camp, and getting nowhere selling door to door, my dad said, 'Forget that,' and took me to the bank. In the old days, those big lobbies were filled with rows of desks with a dozen or more women who had to take every check turned in, enter it into the literal books, debit/credit, etc., and then insert that check into the file cabinets that lined the walls. I used to sell most of a case of those damn peanuts in each bank, so that disappeared in the early '70s.

18. Machinist. When I was young, if we needed a special part, there was a guy we went to who had a huge amount of machinery, and we paid him 25 times the minimum wage to cut a part out of solid aluminum. If we were lucky, we had the drawing ready for him to work from, but he’d also work from the broken part. Today, this is done by a computer and is robot-based.

19. Radio operator. That was my first job in the Army. All the services had thousands and thousands of them, because radios were huge with big batteries or generators attached. You also had to tune them, put up an antenna, etc. And you had to hook up and operate things like amplifiers, receivers, teletype machines, etc., for the big ones.

20. Computer systems operators. The job still exists somewhat, but it's more like programming now and much less physically demanding — no more mounting drives and tapes, especially if you've become a cloud-based shop.

21. Secretary. In the '80s and even early '90s, every middle manager and up had a secretary to coordinate their schedule, type, take their calls and messages, and often literally 'guard' their door as they were generally stationed right outside their office. There were tons of them; they were always women. I had a shared one when I first started in my first corporate job as a junior individual contributor 'manager' in the '90s.

Do you remember any of these jobs? What's a career that has vanished during your lifetime? Feel free to tell us in the comments or answer anonymously using the form below!

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.