Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

So I heard about this for the first time a couple months ago, and then saw it mentioned in this this thread, and after some googling, found this great article and must admit: I'm now intrigued.

The first time my friend told me that she had a personal assistant, I thought "meh, spoiled child needs someone to buy her groceries and pick up her laundry, but I guess it'll save her some time." Then she told me the assistant was in India and I was officially WTF(?!)

After she explained to me how it worked -- e.g. you send them tasks like picking out birthday presents for friends/fam, finding mexican restaurants in a city you're traveling to, etc -- I was even more confused...most of all, perhaps b/c this girl isn't stupid or lazy. In fact, she's pretty sharp, logical (for a girl), funny, sarcastic...she's actually got a lot of the same attributes I pride on having myself, which made the seemingly-harebrained Indian personal assistant thing all the more perplexing. She tried explaining it to me (raving about it), but I still didn't get it. If I want to find a Mexican restaurant in Vancouver, give me around 3 minutes on Google. If I need to pick out what movie I want to see this weekend, again >> just give me a few minutes to browse through the Yahoo critic reviews and I'm all set. In short, I simply couldn't imagine what possible scenario would lend itself to an outsourced Indian personal assistant doing a more efficient job than I could do myself (factoring in the time it would take me to actually explain to them what I want). In fact, that's what gets me the most >> it seems like I'd spend 10 minutes typing up an email to them explaining the task, when I could simply accomplish it myself in half that time.

But, like I said, I have a lot of respect for this girl > she's not an idiot, and I feel like I must be missing something here that would lead an otherwise intelligent and reasonable human being to use this service. I really do WANT to understand this, but I'm struggling. Anyone here make use of these services and have anything positive/negative to say about them?

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

The thing that I don't understand about this is the time zone differences. I mean, when you want to find a Mexican restaurant in Vancouver they're probably fast asleep. Or are they supposed to be on call for you 24/7?

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

"picking out birthday presents for friends/fam"

http://www.dollsofindia.com/dollsofi...ishna_YM08.jpg

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

LOL

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

I thought the whole point of having a personal assistant was getting to choose a hot one who you could bang on the sly... isn't this just an enormous waste of money?

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

doesn't nation have a bunch of these playing 100nl FR for him?

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

Their good for dealing with tasks or people you dont like, or things you dont want to dirty your hands with, like procuring drugs and hookers.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
Their good for dealing with tasks or people you dont like, or things you dont want to dirty your hands with, like procuring drugs and hookers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Over the phone from India? What are they gonna do, give the dealer my credit card #?

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

The best reason I can think of for hiring one of these people would be if I had some data entry sort of job I needed done that didn't involve either sensitive information or require zero mistakes. In general I can't see trusting a service like this with any task significant enough for it to be worth the help.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

this sounds like an even dumber onstar.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
Or are they supposed to be on call for you 24/7?

[/ QUOTE ]

Any time, day or night, they will do the needful.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

I'm sitting here trying to think of things I'd want done by one of these assistants because I love the idea of outsourcing some personal task to India.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
I'm sitting here trying to think of things I'd want done by one of these assistants because I love the idea of outsourcing some personal task to India.

[/ QUOTE ]

Are you having any problems which might require calling some company's tech support hotline?

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
I'm sitting here trying to think of things I'd want done by one of these assistants because I love the idea of outsourcing some personal task to India.

[/ QUOTE ]
Run an E-PUA game on hot myspace chicks and setup dates for you?

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

Having an an indian assitant hit on myspace girls for me actually isn't a bad idea...

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

From what I've gathered of the contents of "Four Hour Workweek", the author has an army of these guys working for all different projects of his. I guess one crew maintains an internet company of his, the other manages all his bills/finance, and another girl helps him with friends/family things.

Essentially, the guy has someone to do everything for him in order to maximize free time.

Note: I haven't read the book yet - this is just what I've gathered.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

Can I outsource SnGs, 6-max NL, and 6-max limit, heads up SNGs to four 4-tabling 180 IQ indian math wiz virtual assistants in Bangalore? At 100/hour per player, 4 bucks/hr should be a bargain.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
doesn't nation have a bunch of these playing 100nl FR for him?

[/ QUOTE ]

The pay people to play scheme has been discussed a billion times and it doesn't really work. I could see hiring someone to datamine though.

If you're a stock trader, you could pay someone to research stocks or read annual reports or whatever.

If you're a student you could have someone do your homework or write papers.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

[ QUOTE ]
I'm sitting here trying to think of things I'd want done by one of these assistants because I love the idea of outsourcing some personal task to India.

[/ QUOTE ]

You totally missed the point. You should hire an assistant to come up with this list of things for you. Don't waste your precious time on this.

Re: Hiring Indian \"personal assistants\"
 

All,

Wow, this thread turned out to be pretty worthless.

teddy, here's another good article on the topic - http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe...feoutsourcing/

I mainly agree w/ you that for the bulk of these tasks, being more Internet-savvy will do the job. Between OpenTable and Yelp, I can come up with a place to eat quicker than it would take to explain my criteria to someone and interact with them to finalize the selection. But many people aren't familiar with the right tools to use to find information and get stuff done quickly on the web.

There have been some stories in the media and posted on some blogs about people (mainly freelancer types) who have actually outsourced much of their jobs.

And if you're doing stuff that's relatively mundane/repetitive in nature, I can see it making some sense.

Anyway, locking this thread since the discussion pretty much sucks. Continue discussion on it in the four-hour workweek thread if you like.