On Demand - Harper's BAZAAR June/July 2019
The boom in virtual valets lets us outsource irksome tasks in the time it takes to send a text. Or so Alexandra English thought …
The idea of having a butler is a touch antiquated — outside of Buckingham Palace, who really needs their newspaper ironed? — but if anyone tells you they haven’t dreamt of having someone on call whose sole purpose is to make their employer’s life as easy as possible and anticipate their needs before they have them, they are lying. Time is the ultimate luxury; convenience a coveted commodity. And in 2019, the lived reality of the 1 per cent is no longer just the dream of the many.
Handballing your physical tasks to someone else isn’t new: any- one with a relatively small amount of money and a smartphone can outsource just about anything: a cleaner takes care of my household chores; groceries are delivered, perfectly proportioned according to the accompanying recipes and ready to cook; and a private driver (ahem, Uber) can be summoned at the lift of a nger (although, disappointingly, I still have to lift my nger myself). But the idea of the personal virtual valet has only just emerged from the business sphere into the personal. I’ve hired Nadia*, who works remotely from India, as part of an experiment to see just how little is required from me for my life to keep running smoothly.
A note: virtual assistants aren’t semi-sentient Siris and Alexas who answer every time you bellow into the abyss — these are real people, usually working remotely from India or the Philippines. e idea of texting a task to someone is Silicon Valley-esque, but the industry is taking o in Australia, too. Rosie Shilo, who runs Virtually Yours, a virtual assistant network made up of Australian- based freelancers, says local VAs “specialise in things like web development, social media or bookkeeping. O shore VAs tend to be more generalist.” As the outsourcing industry has ramped up, VAs are even making appearances in pop culture. is year, Maria Semple’s bestselling novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette will be adapted into a feature lm starring Cate Blanchett as Bernadette, an agoraphobic former architect who palms off more tasks than she probably should to Manjula Kapoor, a remote assistant based in India.
To see if it really is possible to have a life lived to the maximum while doing the bare minimum, I channel Bernadette and find an offshore virtual assistant. This company offers a package deal of five tasks for about $40, and promises to take on just about anything that doesn’t require a physical presence. Just submit a request to the task pool and someone will get back to you.
The first challenge is setting the five tasks, which makes me wish I already had an assistant. But then
celebrated restaurateur Kylie Kwong announces that her famed Sydney institution, Billy Kwong, will be closing in the next “three to five months”. My desperation to have one last meal there increases at the same rate as the difficulty of getting a table, so I call upon Nadia to negotiate sitting times for me. She’ll do all the work and I’ll be rewarded with a plate of steamed spanner crab and prawn dumplings. The guilt wears off quickly and I’m hooked.
I decide to push the limits of my remaining four wishes. Considering my experiment is inspired by Semple’s book, why don’t I outsource the paragraph about the book about virtual assistants to a virtual assistant? How convenient and meta! I ask Anika to please write a summary of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, along with three points that will make me sound smart. By the time she gets back to me, I’ve actually had time to read the book and discover that (spoiler alert) Bernadette’s VA is a front for the Russian ma a. A message from Anika pops into my inbox and I’m nervous about opening it: “Sorry Alexandra, we don’t do content creation.” Oops. I’ve own too close to the sun — time to scale it back.
The next task needs to be challenging but still within the realm of their services. I ask for someone to find me the best airline with the cheapest flights for a seven-night trip to Bali sometime in May. Zara, like Nadia before her, gets back to me quickly. Attached to her email is a comprehensive list of airlines, ratings, dates, times and prices. I’m impressed — until I go to actually book the flights and find her prices are out by hundreds of dollars. When I tell her I’m confused, she says she’s confused too. Whatever, it wasn’t the in-depth comparison I’d hoped for (she admits she’d just used Expedia, which I could have done myself ), and she’d also cut my holiday short by two days. If there’s anything I won’t stand for, it’s less time to relax.
Stuck for inspiration, I hit up Shilo for task ideas (yes, I know, outsourcing my outsourcing). What are the craziest requests her network has dealt with? There was the Polish man who asked for a list of Australian television channels that showed porn; the woman who wanted a (model of a) human brain; and the man who asked his VA to phone Melbourne strip clubs to see if they had his preferred type of woman. (It would save him the time, he said.) I want to get creative without crossing over into lunatic. For my next wish, I ask Marisa if she can help me think of a costume for a Stanley Kubrick-themed party. I assume she’ll get back to me with an all-white outfit and false eyelashes for A Clockwork Orange, or red heart-shaped sunglasses and a lollipop à la Lolita. But when she answers a few days later, Marisa tells me that after “30 minutes of research”, I’m to wear a feathered mask and go as an orgy member from Eyes Wide Shut. I have so many questions, but here are two of them: why did it take 30 minutes to decide on a mask? And those characters wear nothing but masks — what else am I supposed to wear? Another wish wasted.
I’m getting exasperated and resentful; the process of making my life easier is making my life so much harder. Task number five is simple enough: please reschedule my session with my personal trainer, Sebastian. Considering Seb and I see each other most days, asking someone to text him for me is frivolous to the point of being redundant, but I figure that’s the fun of having an assistant. The novelty wears off as soon as Jaya’s text pings Seb’s phone at 3.50am, despite my instructions to stick to an appropriate AEST. Not only has she got my name and gender wrong (“Alexander needs to cancel his session”), but she’s also asked him to get back to her with alternative times without instructions on how to reply. Then the phone calls start (four of them, between 5am and 7am). Thankfully, Seb is in on my scheme and finds it more funny than frustrating, but my patience has run out, and Jaya is fired.
There’s no doubt there is something to the idea that outsourcing can make you happier, but mindlessly passing off the last vestiges of control I have over my life for an end goal of zero effort has left me with zero joy. I wanted an assistant to do everything for me, but I didn’t anticipate how much time and effort goes into managing an assistant. All that downtime I was dreaming about? I spent it emailing, clarifying, correcting and complaining. It’s a good thing I had nothing else to do.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette is out October 24. *Virtual assistants’ names have been changed. This article originally appeared in the June/July issue of Harper’s BAZAAR magazine.
