Since I was young (ok, probably since high school) I have always wanted to have some little monkeys running around that will do whatever I want them to do.  If I want something from the fridge, they’ll run and get it.  If I needed to do something around the house, they would do it for me.  I could just sleep till whenever I want, lounge on the coach all day, and maybe get up just in time to hang out for the night.  Meanwhile, everything would be done for me.  Eventually, I came to a couple of realizations:

• There was a lot more important stuff that needed to be done, which I hated more than going to the fridge and making myself a meal
• They don’t make monkeys as talented as I needed

So I gave up that dream and tortured myself, going through all the banal tasks of the day, wishing for what could have been.  But then I found some monkeys smart enough to take care of the stuff that I hated doing.

I Found Some Outsourcing Monkeys

Author’s Note: I know some people are going to get pissed at me because they think I’m equating monkeys to humans.  I’m not.  Just finish the article to see where I’m going.

OK - so they weren’t real, live monkeys.  I had already learned in school that monkeys that smart were still thousands (or millions) of evolutionary generations away from existing.  And the whole idea of them being monkeys had grown old too.  I would prefer having dogs do whatever I want but I just felt they were a longer shot since they didn’t have the opposable thumbs needed.

I found some outsourcers who were able to do everything I didn’t want to do.  And this wasn’t about doing my laundry or anything which used to be annoying.  These were things that would take me days to do and which were infinitely more boring.  I mean, at least when I folded laundry, I could watch TV, and that just took me 15 minutes. 

Now I realized that I had to train these monkeys (I always just figured they would already be trained) but that’s ok.  Just a bit of my time telling them what to do and they would get it done.  And these monkeys are all different types.  Some are local, some live a couple of time zones away, and others live a couple hemispheres away. 

Initially I Felt Bad Hiring my Monkeys

Even though I’m joking about it in this post, I really did feel bad about hiring other people to do work that I was giving them only because I didn’t want to do it.  It’s just like I always feel bad for bathroom attendants.  While it’s a nice service, you feel bad for other people doing this type of work.

But once I started working with them, I actually felt great about working with these people.  They were so happy to be hired to do work and were so appreciative of it.  I was helping to provide them with income to support their family.  And because they were doing this work for me, I was able to spend time coming up with new ways to make money, and then I could hire more people and help them support their families.

Recently, I got a note from someone I hired to do a lot of work on one project.  It was part time and had a guaranteed payment for the foreseeable future.  I was afraid it was a little lower pay because it wasn’t very difficult work but she was perfectly happy with it.  In fact, I got an e-mail from her recently saying that this work that I was able to provide to her was exactly what her family had needed and been looking for for the longest time. 

Around the holiday season, it felt so good to hear that.  I was extremely glad to have her to take some work off my back but it was even better to hear that I was able to help someone else out. 

In the End, Everyone Wins

I never got the real, live monkeys I envisioned when I was young, I also had no way of knowing at that time what activities I would really prefer not doing.  But In the end, I really got what I wanted - to be Lazy.  And in the process, I was able to help out a variety of people by providing them with some work that they are very happy doing.