The best way to get any work done is to pop in your earbuds and listen to your favourite song. Unfortunately for people in the past, they had to do their really boring jobs without any form of entertainment. Luckily in workplaces such as factories, lectors would be hired to read books or political publications out loud so that people could listen to them.  

Alarm clocks whether they be friends or foes did not always exist. People still needed to wake up, but they certainly had creative ways of doing it in England and Ireland. Knocker-uppers were human alarms! They would use sticks, pebbles or even pea shooters to knock on people’s windows to wake their sleeping customers up on time.

Your history book has definitely mentioned at least one of the many rat plagues that Europe experienced over the centuries. Citizens of Europe took it on themselves to stop the plagues and diseases from spreading. Adults and even children made it their jobs to go out and catch the rats.  Don’t try it at home though, rat nibbles aren’t any fun!

Human calculators were people who’s jobs were to do math equations every day, before the invention of computers. These computers were mostly women and were very important to the development of technology that we use today.

Electricity is a simple light switch away, but unlike our streetlights, old lamps used fire to light their pathways. These street lamps used to be lit with fire because they were powered by gas and a flame. The lamplighter’s job would be to come at dusk and light all the lamps. They did this by using long sticks to reach the lamps, the sticks would fuel and extinguish the flames.