Sunday, April 20, 2008

DISAPPEARING JOBS


young gran
Originally uploaded by
PhylB
From time to time Thomas and I find ourselves discussing jobs that disappear or get outsourced - sometimes in the context of what best to advise the kids to study, sometimes just for fun. Today, it occurred to me that a job that no longer exists is one my grandmother did. My grandmother played piano. She gave lessons and played in a nightclub even when I was a child, but a job she did earlier was a shop job. But not a shop job as I did in my student days! In the olden days when people often bought sheet music, especially as a gift, and often when the buyer didn't play an instrument, people had no way of telling what they were buying. My gran's job was to play sheet music to prospective buyers in a department store in Glasgow. When the buyer liked what they heard, the music was bought, otherwise she'd play piece after piece until they found something that suited their purposes! What a quaint lost world!

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