The Parent BPO

So I agreed on royalty. She decides the price,depending on how guilty she can make me feel. The last article cost me a lot,as in,Its not enough that you abandoned me for the first year of my life,but now you have told the whole world that I was an abandoned child, followed by Oh,I bought myself a new handbag, to which I gamely replied,take the money from me as royalty. This royalty policy is being implemented unilaterally with retrospective effect. I now apparently owe a lot for something I wrote several years ago on bringing up children,which made her friends say,You poor thing,at least my mother lectures me in the privacy of our home; yours does it from the pages of a newspaper.

But I now think that I should offset royalty against fees for increasing amounts of work that is being outsourced to me. Discipline my maid,but dont scare her off,go shopping for this detailed specifications of items and shops but dont buy anything. Just take pictures,check prices and BBM them to me. Its really urgent but please dont worry if you are busy. I have done my research to know that I am not the only sucker in parentdom,and that outsourcing is becoming an epidemic. An older friend of mine told me that the trouble was that women these days were obsessing too much over their children and their marriages. In her generation,everyone knew that the best results came from benign neglect.

Because parents are more responsible and can be held more accountable than any alarm service,and because telecom is cheap,children who dont live at home outsource wake-up calls for exams,job interviews,flights and more. A friend called early one morning in panic and wanted to use my internet. I thought it was urgent office work,but it turned out that she had been outsourced the editing of her daughters much-delayed term paper. Taking advantage of the time difference of five hours,her daughter would mail her the draft before she went to sleep. The mother had to trim down the text,and paraphrase what she had understood of the argument because if you get it,it means,it is clear and simple,and send it back before the daughters day began. The terms of reference of this outsourcing job were explicit,Dont put any of your ideas into it,just fix the grammar and the word count,dont touch the tone,you dont understand these things.

I know many parents who are nervous wrecks,lining up prospective spouses for their children who are too busy making money to be social,to meet people. They have to deliver to exacting specifications,justify some inclusions in the shortlist,and do the tricky job of making all the regret phone calls; or worse still do the keep-on-hold calls,when its neither a no or an yes. How is this different from parents earlier? Well,earlier,as a parent,you got to do the slave labour,but you also got voting rights,maybe even veto rights in all the big decisions in their lives. But now,parents are more democratic,and there is little danger of forcing decisions on children. Heres the new axiom of parenting: the quantum of outsourcing work to parents increases in direct proportion to how liberal the parents are.

I have feeling-bad-about-bad experiences outsourced to me once mom has been told,then daughter gets to forget about it and move on,knowing that the situation will get the angst it truly merits. Last week,I was called,given the need to know details of a bothersome situation and asked what I would do in such a situation. Agonise I said. Pat came the reply,So will you please agonise over it and let me know tomorrow morning what you came up with? I cant do it because I have to go out tonight.

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