Travels with Grumpus

I might have been on to something when I wrote this a couple of years ago.

The Journal reports

Now, some early adopters are figuring out how to tap overseas workers for personal tasks. They’re turning to a vast talent pool in India, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere for jobs ranging from landscape architecture to kitchen remodeling and math tutoring. They’re also outsourcing some surprisingly small jobs, including getting a dress designed, creating address labels for wedding invitations or finding a good deal on a hotel room, for example.

Full story here. Think of it either as a way to make extra cash (if you have a tradeable skill and live in a third-world country), or a cheap personal assistant (if you live in the first world). If, on the other hand, you are American and money is no object, consider hiring a butler. For the bargain-basement price of $70,000 to $120,000 a year, you get a graduate of butler boot camp, where:

For eight weeks, the students hole up inside the mansion to cook, clean, polish, dust, wash and fold. They learn how to iron a pair of French cuffs in seconds flat. They learn how to clip a 1926 Pardona cigar, how to dust a de Kooning canvas and whether to pair an oaky chardonnay with roasted free-range game hen. They learn how long it takes to clean a 45,000-square-foot mansion (20 to 30 hours depending on the art and antiques), where to find 1,020-thread-count sheets (Kreiss.com), and how to design a “stationery wardrobe” — envelopes and letterhead specially designed to reflect the owner’s wealth and social standing. They will be taught that sable stoles should never be stored in a cedar closet (it dries them out), and that Bentleys should never, ever be run through the car wash.

But does all this mean you get a better mousetrap? Not necessarily so, says a bemused multi-millionaire.

“The other day we saw a mouse in the house. Before, I would have just gotten a broom and gotten rid of the thing. But now it’s different. I emailed the household manager. He called the vendor, a pest-control firm, and the pest-control firm caught the mouse. Then the household manager directed two other staff members to dispose of the mouse. That’s five people to catch a mouse. It all seemed normal at the time. But then I thought about it, and I wondered, how did our lives get like this?”

Hmmm. Now this has me thinking again. Could we have stumbled upon the proper industry comparable to a stay-at-home-mom and finally get a proper valuation of what she should get paid (not you, my own darling mother)?