I found my personal assistant on Craigslist. Very happy I found her. I put up a simple posting, ‘computer programmer seeking personal assistant’. Turns out she was tired of being an au pair and decided this would be a better fit. It’s really life changing. I highly recommend it. She pays my bills, responds to emails, cleans up the apartment, walks my dog, manages grocery shopping and occasionally cooks, etc. It’s not that different from what I imagine having a stay-at-home wife was like in the 1950s, except she leaves every evening.
As a counterpoint to the flak you seem to be getting for this comment, I am awful at admin stuff and my partner is better at it and has more free time than I do. since we moved in together, and especially post-pandemic, I have been surprised at how much we have fallen into traditional gender roles - I had never wanted or expected that in a relationship. To the point where I've been considering hiring a PA for exactly those kinds of misc tasks you mention, precisely to prevent my relationship from further developing such '1950s' dynamics. I really don't see what is cringeworthy about that.
I'm a former homemaker and I've studied women's history to try to figure out how to make my life work.
I think we need to rethink how we configure work. Serious jobs almost always implicitly assume it is designed for a male breadwinner with a full-time homemaker wife.
I think it's refreshing to see some of the comments here acknowledge that.
This is really interesting. I wish if I can hire someone to clean my house and do grocery shopping for me. If you don't mind me asking, how many hours/per week she works for you?
Is instacart going to find the exact brand of kombucha you want and be able to substitute it when it's gone? Will they put it in your fridge for you and leave one out on your desk?
An EA/PA is low touch and avoids all the context switching. They're a dependable person you have a working relationship with rather than hit or miss gig for hire.
A service will always be a worse experience. A real human being can mod you and make time for you (this is what you pay them for). To a service, you are a number that the bare minimum is done for to ensure your money comes in.
True, I already have a cleaning service. They come every two weeks and clean the house. Honestly, I'm not satisfied with instacart and all the hidden fees they have/had (last time I used). What is interesting about an individual is they will learn your preferences and have more context in ones preferences as time goes.
What sort of salary are you paying her? Interesting idea but a tough sell on handing someone the keys to my bills and personal life knowing it would be tough to recover if they go rogue.
> It’s not that different from what I imagine having a stay-at-home wife was like in the 1950s, except she leaves every evening.
good for you, but yikes, man, that made me cringe.
you might want to re-think if you'd be comfortable giving the same tasks to a male personal assistant, or if you've somehow unconsciously engineered a large financial/power imbalance, in the disparity between your gross yearly income and what you pay your assistant to do the duties of a "stay-at-home wife". and exactly what you think her role really is.
An interesting note is that small business couples, where the man runs the trade-end of things (physician, skilled trades, etc.), and the woman runs the "managerial"-end (billing, paperwork, etc.) seem to be the most stable of couples.
In matters of money, there are less secrets/unexpected swings; and you both have to be invested in the success of the business, ergo one's livelihood and goal-achievement-vehicle (e.g. for vacations, new cars and appliances, better house, etc.).
Plus, if you cannot tolerate one another and cannot work well together, then you'll know soon enough that perhaps the two of you are not compatible in a partnership (and really, that's all a marriage is if you work for a living -- a partnership to help you both reach your goals).
An added bonus, is that it breads closeness, rather than only seeing your significant other for a few hours every night/morning, and the weekends.
Massive financial/power imbalance? Very. Are both people getting what they want from the arrangement? I would imagine so. The ones that weren't have left/had everything crash and burn, or are on their way.
so in my opinion two people in a romantic relationship that also own/run their business together is a completely different thing than what the 'helsinki' poster described, unless their paid assistant they found on craigslist also has other, uhhh.... duties
Absolutely. It was mostly a tangent I wanted to write out.
On "other duties," I think a lot of people have that mindset in a partner: mechanically do these things that benefit my emotional state, while I mechanically do my things that benefit their emotional state, and repeat until death.
With the common form of payment being money and material goods, for material services. Transactional.
A disheartening state of affairs, but more common than not.
Aren't most who employ the labor of others for things they could do themselves (e.g., getting coffee at Starbucks) leveraging a "financial/power imbalance"?
Or they are arbitraging a time availability and value imbalance to the voluntary benefit of both.
You are a CEO and have five minutes to prepare for a first remote meeting with a potential client that could result in years of business down the road.
What is the time worth to you, to have someone else get the coffee you like?
The important thing ... is treating the person doing services for you as important too, in pay and respect. Because the five minutes they save you by being reliable are worth a lot.
I'd think anyone hiring a personal assistant would be on the advantageous end of a financial power imbalance. Are you just saying a young man wouldn't be hired to clean a house so it's embarrassing when a woman cleans a house? I think the important thing is to pay cleaners enough and make reasonable requests, not refuse to work with them. (I don't have a cleaner, if it matters.)
I'm saying this person seems to have specifically chosen a person for the duties of what they described as a 1950s housewife, which is rather suspicious in my opinion.
this is why I said "unconsciously", I'm asking them to reflect on whether or not they would have hired an equally-or-better qualified male for the same duties. or whether they went straight to "i'm gonna hire a housewife" without thinking about it as a specific choice.
if by some chance the original poster here is not a dude, it's a whole lot less sketchy in my opinion.
Ah, I figured the housewife comment would wreak some havoc, but I can’t really think of a better way to describe. There is no emotional or romantic attachment. If anything, it is friendly, at best. Nothing to really read between the lines on this. It’s a transactional, platonic relationship.
I'm a woman. I've worked in office jobs. I frequently have noticed that getting "life" stuff done is very hard because office jobs were created in the 1950's, when they assumed everyone had a wife at home to take care of "everything else." It makes sense that helsinki is describing his assistant as a 1950's housewife, because all those tasks are the ones that are hard to do now, and where the gaps are these days.
Give how absolutely little you know about this situation, that was completely out of line and asinine. You jumped to a conclusion to polish a hobby horse, completely derailed the conversation, and got downvoted for it.
I’m asking you to reflect on how condescending and presumptuous your original comment was.
Speaking of speech patterns, the one where someone responds to being schooled in multiple ways with “nah…” is an Internet staple. It’s not convincing, but it must be fun to write? :)
You seem to be under the misconception that I have been "schooled". None of the other opinions expressed in this thread in any way change my opinion that calling someone a 1950s housewife is an insult to an employee's dignity.
