June 9

Outsourcing everything

Teaching your child to tie his shoes? Is it possible? Yes.

Recently, the WSJ ran a story on outsourcing so much in one’s personal life. One company that helps you get things done is GetFriday. You can outsource quite personal tasks such as arranging party details, paying bills, setting up appointments, and so forth.

Their uncommon requests are great (and they say a bit about our society):

Daily wake up calls with the local weather report and instructions to get up, make the bed and exercise.

Reminding an over-zealous client to not speed and collecting parking fines. And pay his current parking fines.

Apologizing and sending flowers and cards on their behalf to spouses of clients.

Charting a diet plan, reminding client on it regularly, ordering groceries based on the specific diet plan

Reading bedtime stories to a young kid on phone

Getting a job for a person who lost his job due to outsourcing a year back. We did the job search, did the cover letters, did the resume tuning and got the client a job in 30 days.

Fixing a broken window pane of a house in Geneva, Switzerland. Organized a repair firm to do it.

Collecting home work information from teacherâ€™s voicemail and emailing it to the client (parents of the kid).

Organize an event in Columbia. Fixing dignitaries, calling up, getting appointments, scheduling meetings for the event. This was for a magazine.

Buying underwear on behalf of a client (online purchase only, of course).

Research on how to tie a shoe lace meant for a kid (clientâ€™s son).

Find a parking slot for your car in some other city even before you make the trip.

Ordered garbage bins for home

Get an authenticated weather forecast and weather report for a particular time in a particular place on a particular day, five years ago. This was to be used as supportive evidence for a law suit.

Finding a missing person in the Florida hurricane. We found a contact who had found this person. Task was handled through the web.

Talking to parents in our clientâ€™s stead.