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investors . . . parliament.”
I glance at Jasper again; he seems perplexed but curious.
“Aeronautical engineers and technicians.”
Jasper seems to like aeronautical engineers.
“Prospects of a strong domestic demand.”
After three minutes, I start to feel guilt-ridden. I’ve officially begun to abuse my power. Why didn’t I just turn on the Wiggles? Then again, Mr. Naveen’s lilting voice is so comforting; if there were bright-colored cartoons of strong domestic demand, this would be ideal.
    Speaking of the Indian domestic economy, it’s looking pretty rosy. My team is good , cheap, and absurdly eager. They will do anything short of violating the Geneva Conventions. And with most of the tasks—online shopping, thank-you notes, research— my crew saves minutes or even hours of my day. Admittedly, the outsourcing of my life is sometimes counterproductive—an illfatedorder of an eggplant dish from a nearby restaurant comes to mind. But overall, it’s working. To me, it seems the future of outsourcing is as limitless as . . . blah, blah, blah.
    You know what? I’m kind of bored writing this piece. I’m going into the other room to enjoy some
Entourage
on HBO. So I’ve asked Honey to finish up writing this article for me.
    Once, I was watching
I, Robot
with my wife and I thought Life would become so easy with a robot. Then, the next instant I thought not just a robot but more of a humanized robot. In the book
The World Is Flat,
the author wrote about an interesting job that could be outsourced to India, which provoked me to have a Remote Assistant. Though I have never seen Honey K. B., I speak to her almost everyday when she calls me. Though our communication is not visual, I still know that she is a reliable assistant. Our interactions that we have had through mails and telephonic conversation never made me feel that she is miles away from me. To conclude I would say I did not get a robot but yes a Human like me who can think and work for me .
    Yes, America, we’re cooked.
    CODA
    This is me again, A. J. Jacobs. That was one problem with the aftermath of this experiment—when people e-mailed me about the article, and I’d write them back, they were suspicious. “Is this A.J. or is this Asha?”
    So just so you’re sure: it’s me.
    The article had an unexpected impact when it came out in
Esquire
in 2005. I started to get inquiries from people who wanted to outsource their own lives. I referred them to Brickworkand Your Man in India. A few months later, and perhaps nudged along by the response to my article, both those companies started departments devoted to personal outsourcing. “Virtual assistants,” they’re called and there are now dozens of employees at each. It’s a real business. In fact it’s getting so big I’ve heard complaints from some readers that the Indian assistants are overloaded. The tasks take too long to complete, and the results are unimpressive.
    I must confess I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. Yes, these companies usually provide a good service. But what if my experiment helped take jobs away from American assistants?
    I was feeling really down about this, actually. Then, six months after the article came out, a man wrote me. He said he works in technology and had lost his job the previous year to outsourcing. He’d been looking for a new job to no avail. After he read my article, he decided to hire someone in India to look for a job for him. That’s right: he outsourced his job hunt! And the beauty part is, it worked. The Indian outsourcer found him a new job within a week. So maybe there’s hope for American ingenuity after all. I’m crossing my fingers, anyway.
    I still have Asha on retainer. Or actually, Asha recently switched jobs. So I now have her colleague Sunayana on retainer. I pay a fee of ten dollars a month and an additional ten dollars an hour. I use them every couple of weeks to make rental car reservations or research, say, George Washington’s