Blogger-about-town Robert Scoble recently kicked off an online discussion (and now a wiki) about obsolete skills: “things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us.” Scoble’s list covers a variety of things overtaken by technology: dialing a rotary phone, changing tracks on an eight-track tape, using a slide rule, adjusting a carburetor, and so on.
This got me to thinking: what are the equivalent obsolete skills for web workers? Of course detractors of telecommuting will be quick to put “maintaining personal hygiene” and “changing out of pajamas” on the list, but on a more serious note, here are a few of the skills from earlier jobs that I haven’t needed since becoming a full-time web worker:
- Punching a timeclock (though I still track my own time)
- Transferring phone calls by punching buttons on the phone
- Wearing a tie every day
- Arguing about where to eat lunch
- Using a ten-key calculator
- Drinking from a water cooler
- Fighting for parking space every day
How about you? Has web work made any of your hard-earned skills completely obsolete?
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