I'm fortunate enough to have an apartment that's on the large-ish size, so large in fact, that I have a home office. My office itself is not large, and my apartment is not large, it's just large-ish, so let's just get that straight. Don't go hatin'. For it, I pay dearly, out the a) wazoo, b) bunghole, c) insert your own euphemism here.
However, I pay less than I would pay if I had a separate office, somewhere else, and so I consider it to be "worth it", whatever it is. What is it? Let's examine for a moment: "It" is hours of physical labor attached to a pay check, loud hipsters and neighbors who don't really give a shit factory about the neighborhood or each other, having my bike stolen once every 6 months or so, et al.
Recently, I took a look around my office and saw shit everywhere. The shit had been there for awhile, but it had been slowly creeping up on me. I have a family history of hoardsmanship and I do a lot to stay on top of the growing heap of shiny crap encroaching on me and my space. For example, I recently emptied my Chelsea Mini Storage space and threw out just about everything from my childhood. However, I still have a lot of stuff. So now what should I throw away? The guitar my friend made me by hand for my birthday? Or one of the first guitars ever given to me? Do I toss a ukelele from the 30s or the autoharp given to me by HBO as a birthday present?
I give up. You tell me.
OK, so it's not all valuable stuff. There are the folders of love letters from men I'd just as soon fart on as ever look at again (in addition to a few I still kinda like and keep tabs on), duplicates of just about everything you can think of including headphones, tape dispensers, blank note books and folders, etc.
And that is why I hired a professional errand dude to come over and essentially help me douche my office.
One of my ukelele students referred me to a website called taskrabbit.com where basically, you post a job, and the site's "task rabbits" financially undermine one another to get their hands on the gig. After about a dozen people emailed me with notes ranging from "I do dis job" to "Well, is it gonna take a long time?" to "I'm a trained professional with 20 years organizational experience", I settled on one of the nice strangers to come over, put their sweaty paws all over a lifetime of my experiences and memories and help me choose which ones to throw away.
It took me about 2 and a half hours to pore over the boxes of old Conan O'Brien writing submissions (I didn't get the job), boxes of business cards of comedy managers (they never returned my emails) and posters of me from younger days (I look almost the same), clean the 50 sq foot room where most of my creative ideas come out of and toss everything back into it. The job cost me $50 of my hard earned duckets. $25 an hour - not too frickin' shabby.
The website was pretty easy to use, as long as you have fingers, can read and have an IQ of 7 or higher, you should be fine. The "task rabbits" ranged from professional to questionable. The fellow I finally settled on was a nice enough guy in his 50s who really loved my cat. He helped me mostly in that he was present, and made me actually do this big job I'd been putting off just by having eyes which observed my sloth and slovenliness, and embarrassed me into doing something about it. He did a lot of physical lifting and moving, and advised me on what to keep and toss. But when it came to putting it all back, well, let's just stay there's still a huge pile to my left that was never tended to. He was a fine fellow, and I think if I'd have said the job would have taken 4 hours, it might have been completely finished, but who'd work for $10 an hour in this economy, I ask you?! That was an attempt at sarcasm.
Will I use taskrabbit.com again? Depends. How much would it cost for someone to come over and feed me pudding while massaging my feet?
