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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Is visited the USA just once (in 2003), but there was an old man that took my bag off the end of the luggage belt at the airport and handed it to me. I could easily have picked it up myself, but he was there for those 30 centimeters of bag travel. I remember being amazed about it and remarking the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers.

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I'm always a bit taken back when visiting the toilet at clubs and some restaurants when I'm in the UK as there's a gentleman sitting by the sink handing out towels and stuff. Very strange and utterly useless. Not sure if he's paid by the club or lives of tip, but it makes me really uncomfortable. I just want to take a piss and wash my hands, not have an awkward conversation with a towel handler.

I've always understood that this person's actual job was making sure that no-one was taking drugs in / vandalizing / doing anything illegal in the bathrooms.

They're there so the owner of the club/restaurant can relax, not you.

If this were true, there wouldn't be so much emphases on tipping.

Right now, I feel like this guy is useless and I don't want to give him money and I feel bad about that, like by not paying him I'm calling him useless.

If it were for the owner, and that was clear, I'd feel great because I was making his job easier by not causing any trouble or mess, and on top of that, hey thanks for the towel!

Public bathrooms don't clean themselves like private bathrooms. Particularly in high-volume places (large restaurants, pubs) it can get nasty very quickly. Think sex, drugs, throwing up, people passing out or going to sleep or just acting stupid with feces. Definitely not a useless job.

But it is one of those weird things that survives long past the point of sense, they should just be paid a wage and be employed rather than work on this weird charity-basis. It's a bit akin to waiters in the US working on tips, whereas the rest of the world just pays them a normal wage. The clubs bank on guys with 10 beers in em to both be drunk enough and close to bursting enough to pay for the service.

I did that gig at a county fair one season. You’re there to deter people from pissing on the floor and plundering the place. People behave bizarrely in certain situations.

The highlight of that experience was the drunk lady who stole a toilet lid in the men’s room.

He or she is just living off of the tips, and of the selling of perfume and mints.

I've never seen this in my life in the UK. There is a guy watching over the people in the toilets in the clubs near me, but you don't talk to him and he doesn't hand you anything. Even if he did hand you something, you don't have to have a conversation with him.

Really? Just about every club I've ever been in has this. Selling chewing gum, after shave ("no spray, no lay" etc). But they are there mainly to make sure people aren't doing drugs, or fall asleep on the toilet.

There are quite a few in London. Here's an article about them http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7335315.stm. I think they are mostly to stop people doing coke in the cubicles.

OTOH last time I was in St.Pancras there was a guy collecting the fees to use the washroom and keeping things tidied up. People in the US would be outraged to pay for using a bathroom under those circumstances.

Japan can be even worse. I’ve seen it at hotel seven when you’re eating at the hotel restaurant.

OTOH last time I was in St.Pancras there was a guy collecting the fees to use the washroom

The toilets at St Pancras are free and always have been. He was just some random guy you gave money to!

Maybe was another a London station. Recall there being a turnstile.

King’s Cross is right next door and had turnstiles last time I was there.

I've never once seen this in my life (I typically have over 100k miles of airline travel per year) and have been traveling for work in the US since 2000. I don't understand how this scenario would play out, does he just grab a bag at random and hold it over his head? Read off the tag? Most people I know would be incensed if someone else were to grab their bag off the luggage belt.

You might be confusing this with curb side check in, which is a service airlines use as a convenience to customers checking bags (so they don't need to go to the ticket counter with heavy/numerous bags ).

Baggage handlers at airports pull bags off the belts and put them in a line nearby (and sometimes give them to passengers) when there's a need to clear the belt, or when they don't have other work to do (at some airports). This is mainly to keep the belt from filling up.

They also sometimes do this when looking for a bag for transfer (which failed to get interlined correctly or something, or when an elite has a connection but there's no interline agreement.)

I am sure these people attend other tasks once that's done. They likely also have other belt-related tasks to deal with behind the doors.

I don't travel much. But they are called porters (or, redcaps in Barbados because they wear red caps for easy identification). Let's say you are elderly, tired or have a lot of baggage. You wave a porter over, he or she takes the indicated bags off the airport conveyor belt, loads them onto a trolley, wheels them through Customs, and loads them onto the taxi for you. I've seen elderly, handicapped or heavily burdened (eg couples with 3 kids and 10 bags) use them. How else would one get by?

Similar to people who pack your groceries into bags at cashier. Have only seen this in the states, nowhere else

Pretty sure the idea here is to quicken the checkout and lines-> having someone fill bags as someone else handles payments and you handle paying, makes queues move faster than having them grind to a halt due to someone packing their bags too slowly.

IN Italy there’s a little desk behind the cashiers and it’s split in half so while you fill your bags using one half the next client uses the other half. The amount of useless jobs in the states always amazes me, but then you look at the unemployment rate and everything becomes less useless ...

The US has this depending on the establishment. The chain "Adli" (German in origin I think, but they're common in the US) doesn't have baggers, they just have a counter past the checker and you are expected to bag your own groceries. I'm also pretty sure they require you to bring your own bags too, though, so baggers wouldn't make much sense.

This too can get clogged. Been there and seen it take forever to go through lines in Italy.

I think you may not realize how many shoppers/how much person-density there can be in the US.

When LIDL came to Norway this was one of their mistakes. They insisted on not having the split desk behind the cashiers.

Norwegians was confused every time AFAIK.

I was a bagger for a while. For me, it was an entry level thing at the grocer. You would be responsible for organizing (not stocking) the shelves and sometimes cleaning. The highest paid people except managers and the owner were the cashiers. This was 20 years ago.

Oh boy. I normally lurk but this one gets me.

Having to bag my own groceries is infuriating. In Canada, The Real Canadian Superstore was the first to do this and it has a shitty feel.

The lines are long, I bring my own bags and have to get out of peoples way as I pay and try to bag my own groceries.

I actually started going to self checkouts because if they don’t bag my groceries, cashiers are useless to me!

If you think bagging is just stuffing bags in orde that groceries come, you’re nuts. I hate it when a useless cashier takes my apples and just tosses them into bags too. They’re fragile and need to be handled as such.

I definitely think bagging is a service worth paying for and appreciate when I get a bagger that gets it.

Oh, my first real job was bagging and helping customers with the groceeos to their cars. Not useles.

In my country I've seen it mostly as a charity before Christmas: some teenage volunteers would ask you if you want them to pack your groceries, expecting a small donation in return.

Packing your own groceries is work and boring though.

If packing your own groceries fills your definition of work and doesn't just come under "shit you just do to get something from one place to another because you need it in your life". You REALLY need to get out and perform a variety of jobs. Like damn you gotta be about as useless as tits on a bull if you think pulling the food your going to eat that is NECESSARY FOR YOUR SURVIVAL off a bench and into a bag is work.

Growing food is necessary for my survival but I don’t do that myself. Grocery bagging is also not trivial. You can’t just throw things into a bag in random order, you need to think about it. A well packed set of shopping bags is a big convenience, and I don’t want to spend the bandwidth to do it.

There is a big difference between a job that creates convenience for other people and one that’s redundant or pointless.

> You can’t just throw things into a bag in random order, you need to think about it. A well packed set of shopping bags is a big convenience, and I don’t want to spend the bandwidth to do it.

Please tell me that you say this only to win the argument, because, come on. Putting things into something else is as trivial as it gets, and I can assure you that, even though I have never seen one, a person whose job is to fill the bits someone else bought into bags for them will give absolutely zero fucks about how he puts them things into them bags. Except maybe it's somewhere like Harrods, I guess, if they are paid high enough (now I recalled this: there was a comment or an article recently about an employee of Harrods whose job was to get fired when customers came to complain about other personnel).

You probably only think this because you don't do a good job. There are strategies and methods for bag packing that produce better results.

You figure out how to build a base, how to seperate items by contimination risk, learn how to fill a bag up.

People who do it poorly give you 15 bags when 7 will do.

The biggest incentive is to do it faster. The job is boring as sin, so you just want to get it over with.

It's also a good job for mentally challenged people. It's low stress, something they can learn, and something they can do well at.

Except while I am putting things on the conveyer belt I can’t exactly be bagging at the same time. In France, checkout lines are slower because you have to run from one side of the checkout belt, to load, then to the other side, to bag and then you have to pay; meanwhile people are waiting. That “useless” job increased efficiency since bags can be filled while I am attending to the transaction. Unless you buy just a few things at a time, it’s a huge timesaver.

Also common in latin america.

It's something that has disappeared over time (like elevator attendants). If I had to guess it was a holdover from before there were actually conveyor belts and porters manually pushed out cards of luggage to stops and helped people with them.

In the US you often see people holding a sign saying "slow" next to construction or road work.

This is a job that could literally be automated with a pole :)

You'd be surprised. Cars will burn a sign, but they'll stop dead when they see a person holding a sign.

You also have to watch for the pedestrians walking around and so on. It's actually a lot more involved than you think.

I did it a few times. Not hard, but it does matter a lot, and definitely not pointless.

I can't help but ask, how about a wax sculpture? hehe :)

But, yeah you have a point.

Those signs say stop on the other side and are used in conjuction with someone on the other end of the construction holding up the opposite sign so that a single lane can be used to handle traffic in two directions. That job would need to be automated with a traffic light.

In Germany, no-one is holding stop/slow signs at any construction site. This job is universally done by portable traffic lights.

In Germany, people respect traffic lights even when there's no one there to enforce your good behavior.

A smart traffic light that can count how any cars enter and exit the zone. It's perfectly possible to automate, but it may not be the best ROI around.

They are common in Sweden for slower roads and streets. I’m quite certain they don’t count the cars, instead just leaving enough time even for slow cars to pass through.

That also breaks down when they need to fully stop traffic from both sides so a equipment can be moved. How do you tell the automated lights to stop everything automatically when those instances are irregular.

You press a button. I’m not joking either, they have a way to program them quickly for exactly this reason. Set them on a cycle, or turn them to manual.

The system would also need to detect which direction the traffic was going. In morning rush hour, outbound would be much heaver than inbound (of your neighborhood) so it would typically be unidirectional.

I've seen such lights in remote construction sites on road trips. They do exist.

It’s not uncommon in the US West where you may have lengthy stretches of road that are single lane because of construction.

I was that guy as a kid, at least for road work. The role rotated through my crew while everyone else worked in the manhole or on the street. Part of the reason for it to be a human is to serve as a witness for the police when a distracted driver plows into the road crew. This was in the 1980s, I’m sure drivers pay much more attention today.

> This was in the 1980s, I’m sure drivers pay much more attention today.

Missing the /s. Drivers today are far worse than they were in the 80s.

I would say they are almost certainly less drunk now

But a lot more have been smoking weed.

TBF driving while tired is probably more dangerous than driving after smoking cannabis

I agree, but driving while high is not at all safe. Sure, it's less bad than drinking, but it's still more dangerous than driving when sober (and rested). Accident rates have gone up since legalization. [0,1,2]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/auto-crashes-are-on-the-rise...

[1] http://gazette.com/study-finds-fatal-crashes-in-colorado-hav...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/what-...

It depends on what you measure. Crashes are going up ever so slightly vs population growth, but fatalities per crash has astoundingly been reduced by about 70%, which is to say that you were more than 3x as likely to die in crash in 1980 vs 2011.

That's because we have better cars now which offer better protection for passengers and pedestrians: seat belts, air bags, "softer" bumpers, collision detection, etc.

I don't know about now, but when minimum wage was $4.75 those guys were making $20.00 an hour. It was a highly coveted job in some circles. They are starting to automate it with portable traffic lights though.

I once saw a memorable setup on a fairly desolate piece of Queensland highway: There were three flagmen (as they are or were called Down Under) spaced over with a few hundred meters between them, each with a flag warning me to slow down, roadwork ahead. At the other end three others, of course, to take care of traffic in the opposite direction.

But here's the thing: There wasn't any roadwork in between. There had been, but everything was neatly packed away.

Then again, I've worked in public administration. Nothing will shock me.

The first lollypop bearer in each direction was indicating the presence of five other people at work on the road.

They are almost exclusively female Irish backpackers here in Australia from what I hear. Usually the only females on a crew.

> the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers

What if you were older/disabled and had trouble lifting a medium-large suitcase?

Seems like not the most useless job in the world, especially since it helps keep things moving in the airport and reduces congestion by getting people their bags slightly faster.

I find the concept of having to have someone pump gas for you (by law) another strange example of a pointless job, I'm quite capable of pumping my own gas.

When several big planes clog US customs then there are no passengers to pick up bags from the luggage belt and it can fill in entirely.

So maybe this man is not needed all the time but definitely lack of somebody to unload the belt would cause problems.

I've seen this at airports that had seemingly small or poor quality luggage belts, and figured that their actual role was to help ensure the smooth running of things and stop the belt jamming up with too many bags.

Strange experience indeed. I do not think I have ever seen that in any of USA airports, large or small.

If this was in the unsecured area, that may not have been an employee, but a stranger trolling for tips.

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