Today might be the last day you’ll ever have to make that dentist’s appointment sneakily at your desk or pay the phone bill in your lunch hour.
You can now, for $15 an hour, hire an assistant in an Indian call centre to do it all for you. Your outsourced PA will help with almost anything — from appointments and phone calls to research or reminding you to go to the gym.
”Most of the clients are nice to us — no one has shouted at me yet,” says Raji Hari (35), one of 150 ”remote executive assistants” for a company called Brickwork in Bangalore. ”The main advantage is the time difference. We’re able to do tasks for people while they’re sleeping. You wake up to an email telling you it’s done.”
But isn’t it easier to just do something yourself, rather than instruct someone thousands of kilometres away to do it on your behalf? One client, an investment banker who asked to remain anonymous, admits it might be, but: ”Who hasn’t had that feeling where they just want someone else to deal with all that mundane crap? I think it’s wonderful.”
”People have busy lifestyles and their routine work takes away a lot of their time,” says Vivek Kulkarni, the founder of Brickwork. There are some tasks they won’t accept, however: ”If it deals with adult entertainment, we refuse, partly because of our culture in India.”
One of the chores most frequently given to remote assistants is to wait on hold to get through automated phone systems. Which might mean that a call centre in India is being employed to deal with … a call centre in India.
Whether this is a good or a bad consequence of globalisation is for you to decide. — Â