I stopped paying the bills to write this...

Our piano tuner was telling me about her husband’s job. For twenty-five dollars an hour, Henry does pretty much anything you’d want done around the house that doesn’t involve getting dirty. He doesn't have many clients, but some of his clients employ him for a full day every week, so he carries a pretty full schedule.

Some of his duties include some pet care (but no child care), minor repairs around the house, transportation (for some elderly clients), and administrative duties.

Henry has a client who is an attorney married to an attorney. No kids, these two lawyers enjoy a very full schedule, and Henry is employed to attend to their household administration. He pays their bills, monitors their home maintenance, and schedules specialists (plumbers, HVAC, yard care, house cleaner, etc.). I’m sure that there are many other tasks that are shunted his way, but these fit into the description that the piano tuner gave.

All of this is nice, and it prompts reflection upon the ways that people earn a living, but for some of us, it may also induce immediate daydreams of the ways that this luxury could free up time for higher-priority dimensions of day-to-day living. Many of us who take care of these things on our own find that much of our “free time” is filled with maintenance-of-life issues, and that our true discretionary time is even less than we often calculate. I would imagine that Henry gets these things done more quickly than we do, as he is accountable to his clients for his time, and he approaches the tasks more as a job – less likely to be postponed by the persistent interruptions of life at home.

The kicker for me came after I speculated that Henry ought to have a backlog of clients based solely upon the certain recommendation that he would get from the lawyer client. She must be so pleased with his service that her acquaintances – likely of similar lifestyle and income level – would be eager to enjoy the same luxury.

“Oh, no,” replied the piano tuner. “He is sworn to secrecy. The lawyer wants everyone she knows to think that she does it all on her own.”

People find life entirely too time-consuming.
Stanislaw J. Lec