July 25th, 2007
The examined life
It was February 14, 2007 - and for Valentine’s day Toby gave Brooke a unique gift: an Indian named Suresh. Suresh is an offshore personal assistant, and as Brooke often says, he is “the gift that keeps giving.” Toby was inspired to hire Suresh because of Brooke’s interest in offshoring and because of a pretty well-known article called “My Outsourced Life” that appeared in Esquire. While the Esquire article was more of a joke (the author had his assistant send apology notes to his wife), Brooke and Toby spent hours brainstorming how they would use an offshore assistant to actually improve their productivity and quality of life.
***
Toby Segaran: I’m a Kiwi, writer, programmer, collective intelligence enthusiast, gadget packrat and “person of exceptional ability” — but I fell short of “extraordinary.”1 My work involves designing algorithms for data analysis of everything from drug trials to the Technorati Top 100. I’ve lived in three different countries. I am the author of this book, which came out in August of 2007, and I sometimes speak at conferences. I graduated from MIT in 2000.
Brooke Blumenstein: I’m a recovering Floridian, a recent Stanford MBA, and management consultant. Since leaving Florida, I’ve lived and worked in Boston, New York, Houston, Seattle, Bangalore, Palo Alto, and (finally) San Francisco. Lately, I’ve taken to growing mint (for mojitos) and basil (for pesto). I studied philosophy and computer science at Wellesley - and have continued my advocacy for women through the Women’s Initiative Network at the Stanford GSB. One day I’d would like to become a professional conversationalist.
B&T: We live in San Francisco where we frequently bark at sea lions. We both hate driving. Although we were probably frequently in the same room while in college, we didn’t meet until much later.
***
We started this blog to capture and share what we like to call our “life experiments.” We love examining and experimenting with our life - we often find that the smallest of interactions or ideas can lead to “aha” moments.
Suresh is an ongoing experiment - we’re constantly trying to figure out the best ways to use him. But we have many other “experiments” as well. Sometimes we attend conferences that aren’t strictly relevant to our careers. Sometimes we talk to the most unusual looking person at the bar in South Beach (and later find him working at our office in NYC, a true testament to the “we are all connected” theory). Sometimes we brainstorm ways that leading edge technology (and the ways that tech geeks work and share ideas) can be applied in a more traditional business or household setting.
We live the examined life, so that you don’t have to. Or so you’ll want to.
- person of exceptional and extraordinary ability are actual designations given by the INS [↩]
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Just out of curiosity - how is your life examined when you treat a person like an object/experiment (suresh)?
Personally I would not want to live an examined life if it means we are going back to the days where people are not treated equally and with respect and we hire Indian servants that are outsourced as experiments.
Jennie Nevin
West Village
NYC
Jennie,
Thanks for your comment.
We have never felt that employing an assistant in India was any more exploitative than getting service at a restaurant, especially since such a job as a personal assistant is highly coveted.
Further, as we always do with people we interact with, we’ve made an effort to learn about Suresh as a person.
We’re sorry if you got the impression that we don’t treat people with respect just because we’re trying to create different experiences in our lives. In fact we’ve found most interesting experiences actually come from having good relationships with others.
B:
A pleasure to see what you’re up to, and glad that you’re still working to learn the “ways of outsourcing.” I must say I understand where Jennie’s coming from… while I laughed at Jacob’s article, I found myself picturing a young Indian lady rolling her eyes, and saying over her sholders to her friend…”you can’t believe what the dolt is asking for now, friggin’ !@#$%”. It’s all one grand experiment!
Good luck with everything,
R
Um, I can definitely see where Jennie is coming from.
I myself gulped when I saw the sentence “Toby gave Brooke a unique gift: an Indian named Suresh.” Forget political correctness. You might want to change that, it just doesn’t sound right.
I also think that in your attempt to “learn about Suresh as a person” you have unwittingly personalized him too much. Suresh is NOT like getting service in a restaurant. Having a PA is like getting service in a restaurant. Suresh is like Bob the bartender who you leave a tip for (and everybody pities). It may just be language, but language creates emotion (and emotion creates action).
I think depersonalizing Suresh would give him more respect as a person, at least in this public forum (blog). How you treat him day-to-day in your personal interaction may be different.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with describing Suresh as a gift. Sounds like the service was just a valentines gift. What’s the big deal?
I think the idea of having a personal assistant in the U.S. is foreign and this blog is helping describe some uses of an internet-based PA. It’s not about human exploitation. LOL.
The details around the screwups interested me as I’ve managed a group of indian-based developers and have seen first-hand the need….the absolute necessity of being clear, repetitive, and basic when describing the tasks required.
BTW, Brooke….Go Cardinal!
Toby, love your book. It is a regular read and reference book for both myself and my peers down here in SoCal.
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{Toby gave Brooke a unique gift: an Indian named Suresh}
how on earth you managed to find the most disgusting sentence to describe the situation?
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