5 Odd Jobs People Were Once Paid to Do
By: Ben Kageyama
Tags: History, Work, Nonfiction, Labor, Jobs

5 Odd Jobs People Were Once Paid to Do

#4 Dog Whipping

Unemployed men in line at the soup kitchen (1931), from the US National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Technology and artificial intelligence have been rendering more and more jobs obsolete. A volatile mix of automation and lockdowns have led unemployment rates to double digits in many parts of the world. Last April alone, there were 23.1 million jobless Americans.

All of these factor into the many anxieties a regular laborer has to deal with day-to-day. Apart from a stagnant wage, they also wake up to uncertainty.

Still, the extinction of jobs isn’t something new. Sometimes, the innovations and circumstances that lead to obsolescence are welcomed by both clients and workers alike. That’s because some of these jobs were downright awful.

Here are five jobs people once did that now have been made obsolete through the passage of time.

1. Human Garden Ornaments

Human Garden Ornament (1795), By Johann Baptist Theobald Schmitt, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Quarantine has made a lot of people discover the joys of landscaping and backyard gardening. Among the many garden decor items that have been sold due to this trend is the classic garden gnome. The precursor to the garden gnome was a garden hermit, and being paid to be an ornament in a rich person’s garden was a real job in the 18th century.

The worker was hired to look like a hermit — long nails, untidy hair, and a disheveled beard were all required by his employer. Some of them were even prevented from cleaning themselves to give a more “authentic hermit” appearance. When visitors arrived in the garden, these hermits read them poetry or lines from popular books as a form of entertainment.

These hermits-for-hire were not allowed to leave the garden until the end of their contract period. This often lasted for months and sometimes years, with failure resulting in forfeiture of pay.

With all these strict rules, it was common for garden hermits to quit their job midway, forcing nobles to replace them with a variation of the garden gnome we have today.

2. Human Alarm Clocks

Knocker Upper at work (1947), Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

One thing we take for granted is the system of “date and time.” We don’t think about calendars, clocks, and schedules as innovative because most of us were born into the system — we can organize our days through our phones accordingly. But a unified system of time and date is a fairly recent invention in history, and so is the annoying alarm clock that comes with it.

The job of an alarm clock is to wake people up, and in 19th century Britain, that was done by a person called the “Knocker Upper.”

The human alarm clocks would use a long pole made of bamboo to reach the window of their clients. With a small wire tied on its end, they would then tap on the window until their customers arose for work.

People hired knocker uppers on a subscription basis because they couldn’t afford expensive alarm clocks, which we have on our phones today. The practice was so ingrained in factory-work customs that the role persisted even up to the 1970s in some parts of Britain.

3. Poop Farmers

Toilet in Rosenborg Castle Copenhagen, by Zymurgy, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Another thing we rarely think about, and for understandable reasons, is how exactly our poop gets disposed of. There is a complex system that makes sure most of the modern world is free from foul odors and the diseases that come with them. But what is now largely automatic used to be a manual job.

Known commonly as gong farmers, old English for “to go,” these men worked in groups to save the town from a build-up of human waste. The man tasked with scooping poop into a bucket down a pit was known as the “hole man.” Waste would then be passed on to the “rope men,” tasked with pulling the heavy pile out of the pit. Lastly, the “tub man” brought the waste and disposed of it outside of the town.

When more intricate systems of plumbing were developed, the need for gong farmers slowly waned. I’m on the fence about whether or not they were happy about that.

4. Dog Whippers

Dog Whipper Statue in the Netherlands, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

“Dog whipper” was an official title given by a church to men who controlled the behavior of bothersome animals during holy ceremonies. As the name implies, they literally whipped misbehaving dogs during a service.

At that time, churches had no effective way of regulating the entry of animals, so they did things manually. These early iterations of animal control officers were equipped with three-foot-long whips and a pair of tongs to catch and get rid of noisy, and often fornicating, cats and dogs.

They had a second role too. Dog whippers also sometimes forcefully poked dozing and sleeping mass goers awake!

5. Court Dwarfs

Portrait of the court dwarf Sebastián de Morra (1645), by Diego Velázquez, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Court dwarfs have been recorded in the histories of Egypt, Rome, and China. They were often given as gifts to different ruling families and sometimes traded as property. In early modern Europe, court dwarfs gained a little more esteem, earning a wage and sometimes doubling as diplomats.

Most court dwarfs were given a ceremonial job in royal courts. They were placed beside the king or queen during public gatherings in order to make the royals look more powerful in comparison to their short stature. Other dwarfs also played the “natural fool,” often complementing a jester.

As the influence of royal families decreased, so did the employment of court dwarfs. Historians point to the reign of Charles the XII of Sweden as the point wherein the practice completely stopped.