This is my second one on personal outsourcing/offshoring today - seems like there's a lot of this in the news. I am kinda undecided on whether this is a good trend or bad so I'm posting it here and see if any of you respond to my poll in the sidebar.
Offshoring: At your beck and call
You, too, can offshore a chore: Sandy Mitchell on the rise of 'virtual assistants’ – long-distance elves who magic away the boring bits of your life
Who leads the most pampered existence? Victoria Beckham, Elton John or me? Probably me, on reflection. Victoria and Elton will sizzle with envy as soon as they hear about the gilded life I have enjoyed this past week, with a team of willing elves working day and night on three different continents to satisfy my every fancy and idle caprice. Not one of my assistants - Donna in America, Shashi in India and Sergei in Russia - has uttered a word of complaint at the crescendo of my shrill demands.
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While Mrs Beckham must spend a mighty chunk of husband David's earnings to have countless assistants fetch and carry at the click of her fingers, I have laid out less than £50.
Stress has vanished from my life in a week, my dreams have become sweeter, my forehead smooth. And before the urge to wipe the smug smile from my face overpowers you, I should hastily add that anyone can enjoy this supremely spoiled level of luxury at the same absurd price. All you have to do is outsource your life.
Outsourcing, or "offshoring" as it is also known, is a trick big businesses cottoned onto years ago when they realised how much money they could save by employing staff to answer telephones in low-waged English-speaking countries instead of at home.
Now we can use the same principle individually to our advantage thanks to the internet. Online agencies on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere have popped up to offer their services as "virtual assistants" (VAs) to anyone in Britain with a few quid to spare - housewives, students and lazy so-and-sos like me. "Send your chores to Bangalore," one such company advertises. Who could resist?
My life, like that of most people, is littered with urgent little tasks I have found a way to put off indefinitely.
Didn't my wife ask me to book a couple of restaurants in Cornwall for our holiday? Wasn't I supposed to find a better deal on our car insurance? What on earth can I give the godchildren for their birthdays? And, blimey, I forgot to chase that man about delivering manure for the garden.
The list was longer than I realised, but outsourcing promised that at long last - hallelujah! - I could tip the whole messy barrow-load of my personal chores on to someone else, and someone efficient at that.
Before I leapt headlong into this mesmerising virtual world at the start of the week, I asked others who have experimented with "personal off-shoring" how it worked for them.
Was that a note of crazy devilment that entered the sober voice of Michael Barrett, a property lawyer in central London, when he began to relate his experience? Barrett has been using a virtual assistant in India at a company called getfriday.com for a year and a half.
He began by asking her to do mundane office tasks such as proof-reading legal contracts, until one day he happened to go to Selfridges to buy a new pair of his favourite trousers. The store had sold out. He sighed and would have left it at that, but an imp took a grip on him.
Back at his desk, he tapped out an email to Bangalore asking if his VA could find him an identical pair of trousers in stock at any other shop in England. "I don't know how she did it, but she found a pair in the wilds somewhere and sent an order off for me." The imp tightened its grip.
Barrett, who lives in the Barbican complex of flats and arts venues in London, discovered soon afterwards that he had run out of the rubbish disposal bags normally supplied by the estate office. Instead of calling, as he usually did, at the porter's office on his way to work to pick up more, he emailed his VA in India to contact the estate office for him and arrange for the bags to be dropped off at his flat.
"It was partly that I was amusing myself to see how extreme we can get," confesses Barrett, who pays £50 for 10 hours' help a week from his VA, about a quarter of what he would pay for equivalent help in Britain. "To me it is a smallish payment for an awful lot of drudgery."
Myriad possibilities began to shimmer before my eyes as I envisaged how much of my life I could shunt on to a VA - and that was even before I spoke to Derek Timothy, who lives with his family in Livingstone in Scotland and who discovered a completely different use for outsourcing.
Timothy likes to make up bedtime stories for his children and one of their favourites was about a boy named Robbie Rubber-bum, proud possessor of a bottom with magical powers. "The kids kept saying: 'Tell us the story again.' I got fed up saying it, so I wrote it down. Then one of the wee boys told his primary school classmates about Robbie Rubber-bum and they started asking for the story." Timothy thought he might as well have the tale published privately, until he discovered the cost of commissioning the essential illustrations would be a prohibitive £10,000.
Timothy turned to the internet, where he quickly stumbled upon an outsourcing website that introduced him to an illustrator in Ukraine. A week later, he had a full set of colour illustrations of a quality he describes as astounding. And the cost? Not the thousands of pounds he was facing in Britain, but just £410.
The only snag was the culture gap. "The illustrator's English was very good, but he struggled with the humour of the story. It is very British humour and I had to explain how this little guy's bum changes shape."
By now I was itching to outsource my entire existence. I used getfriday.com's toll-free international phone number to call its Bangalore offices, where one of the senior managers assured me, in ornate Victorian English, that he would be delighted to be of assistance, even though the company's 50 employees were almost overwhelmed with business from their swelling international roster of 400-plus private clients.
Right away, an assistant would be made available to me six days a week, 24 hours a day. But I must feel free to call the manager in person any time on his mobile, he insisted, because (poor mug) he works British hours despite the time difference in Bangalore. At this point he handed me over to my dedicated VA and Shashi entered my life.
Not since I was a baby in nappies have I felt so completely cared for by anyone. Within two hours, she had resolved the tangle of our family car insurance, with its assorted speeding endorsements, vehicles and drivers, saving me several hundred pounds a year on premiums.
She also gently hounded the reclusive local farmer who was supposed to deliver the manure, phoning him relentlessly over several days to leave imploring messages, and whenever she went off duty she handed over to her colleagues on the late shift who continued to chase him into the night.
Meanwhile, she slickly selected a list of presents appropriate for the ages and sex of my godchildren (most of which were ideal), providing me with weblinks so I could purchase them at the click of a mouse. And a table at both Rick Stein's seafood restaurant in Padstow and Jamie Oliver's Fifteen outside Newquay now awaits me later next week.
When I told my wife I had cleared my backlog of chores, she looked at me with the love-light bright in her eyes.
Altogether, these tasks took Shashi five hours to complete, for which her company's fee amounted to £25. (No international phone calls are charged to clients unless a task requires more than 50 calls, apparently.)
Then, out of the blue, something happened that threatened to ruin my virtual love affair: I was hit by a pang of ethical unease about exploiting India's cheap and oh-so-willing labour. Shashi is a graduate in computer science, after all, and vastly over-qualified.
To appease my conscience, I contacted Vivek Kulkarni, a former Indian government official who was responsible until recently for establishing Bangalore as the information-technology and outsourcing centre of the nation. "There are two million graduates coming out of our universities every year. All jobs are welcome," I was reassured by Kulkarni, who now runs his own thriving business-to-business outsourcing company, brickwork.com.
That was good enough for me. And suddenly one virtual employee no longer seemed enough: it was time for me to recruit a small army. The place to do it was the website guru.com, which claims to link 650,000 freelances around the world with anyone with work to offer.
I had just the job in mind. Some recordings that I made a year or two ago of my elderly relatives talking about their lives and our family history had been mouldering in a bottom drawer and I knew I would never get around to transcribing them. Why not blow the dust off those discs and toss them into cyberspace, trusting that someone out there would take on the crushingly dull task of listening and typing for several hours?
I decided to offer £5 an hour for the job, about a quarter of what you would pay in London to a typical stenographer with buffed nails and a well-thumbed Hello! magazine. Then, having posted my job on the website one evening, I returned to my desk the next morning and blinked with disbelief to see my inbox alive with 19 bids for the job, from all corners of the globe.
There were six from different states in America, three bids from Pakistan, one from France and one from a professor of linguistics in Serbia who went to enchanting baroque lengths to impress me with his suitability for the lowly task. All but a few of the bidders posted immaculate CVs, along with beautifully worded personal introductions.
Here is an excerpt of a typical reply, from Saleem in India: "I would like to submit a bid of $8 per hour less than you mentioned for this project.
"I am a very organised person. Moreover, I am always open to learning new things and like to put my maximum effort into accomplishing a task.
"I would like to assure you that I am not the kind of person who wastes time and complains about the load of work. Quite the contrary, I always welcome more work."
His hunger for hard labour was humbling, embarrassing and alarming. I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice, hopelessly overwhelmed by the multiple forces I had unleashed. And the bids kept on coming until, with sweaty palms, I finally awarded the job to Donna in Virginia because her references were so impressive that she should forget her job as a legal secretary and run for US President.
There was really no rush to get the job done, yet Donna promised to finish it within 48 hours. A day later, she sent an unexpected and anxious message: "I am finding some portions of the recording inaudible, which I personally find distressing, but I am doing my best to get you the most complete and accurate transcript I can." Another day passed, the deadline arrived and the transcript arrived. It was flawless.
This left only one more mess to sort out and one more recruit to find. The task was long overdue and involved sorting the thousands of digital photos languishing on my computer, destined (one day, never) for the family albums.
Sending such personal mementoes into cyberspace gave me serious pause for thought, but reassurance came from various quarters. One of the managers at guru.com put me in touch with a second-year undergraduate at Oxford who had used the site to find a website designer for the New College May ball; a young composer in Belfast who had linked up with a company in China to produce a CD of her electronic music; and a father in London who had used someone to design an online game that would teach his children their times tables.
Their first-hand reports were all glowing, so now nimble-fingered Sergei in Russia is busy editing and laying out our family photographs.
By now it was Friday evening. I had endured an utterly exhausting week sending all those emails around the world and the only thing that remained to do before opening a bottle of good red wine was to read the children their bedtime story. So I emailed Bangalore. Could Shashi choose a suitable story and read them to sleep?
The phone at home soon rang and the children sat entranced in front of the speakerphone as they listened to a voice with a lilting Indian accent telling the story of a monkey and an elephant that loses its heart. But what I also heard as I listened was something quite different - it was the sound of the future, because outsourcing is surely set to change our lives radically.
It seems that what I have witnessed this week is only the very beginning of the revolution. "A very high percentage growth rate is likely in personal outsourcing, with increasing invention and many different services being offered to consumers," predicts Duncan Aitchison, managing director of TPI, a consultancy specialising in corporate outsourcing. Already, he notes, outsourcing has spread from India (the largest offshore provider) to Eastern Europe and South America, driven in large part by cheap internet connectivity.
Of course, as the National Outsourcing Association points out, the growth of outsourcing will always be hampered by concerns about security of information and the barriers of language and culture that arise when sending projects to another country.
But where might all this lead? Showing the way is Timothy Ferriss, an American entrepreneur who has taken what he calls "geo-arbitrage" to the limit, as he explains in his new bestselling book, The 4-Hour Workweek.
He has arranged his life so that he can be based in Mexico and use the internet to manage his food-supplement company, which operates in the US, and employ virtual assistants in India to handle all the routine tasks thrown up by his personal and business life.
He reckons he has reduced his weekly workload to four hours' worth and says: "Fun things happen when you earn in dollars, live on pesos and compensate in rupees." It seems to be that outsourcing can infect your mind with a degree of megalomania.
But I wanted a second opinion on that, so I went to the person best qualified to judge, Shashi. She agreed, addressing me in the style that I have asked all my apprentices in the expanding empire to use. "Yes, Sir Sandy," she said, before bidding me good night and a happy weekend.
Bangalore Chores
Getfriday.com's Virtual Assistants undertake some unusual tasks…
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