Browse > Home / Outsource Blogs / Mom Sourcing could be a prank, but the outsourcing idea rocks

Mom Sourcing could be a prank, but the outsourcing idea rocks

May 11, 2009

One day later, i.e. on May 11, I logged on to mom-sourcing.co.in. to check how many ‘time challenged” sons and daughters had booked a call to their mother on Mother’s Day and to my utter disappointment found that the site is dead.

The ‘sample call’ link still works and you might like to listen to the canned greeting for Laura’s mom but all the other links are dead. Not surprising, since the Mother’s Day is just a one-day affair. Someone had a great idea, made some money on it. Probably didn’t even hire any “Indian dude’ to place the calls! He and his buddies in Florida or California might have handled it themselves — but the idea sure rocked!!!

Of course, I couldn’t gather any statistics from the site. All I could find out was that the service was launched by Mother, a New York based service and it became clear from a few users’ comments on other sites that the service was not phony and a few actually got their moms or mother-in-laws registers for it and are thrilled with the recipients’ response to the “hilarious service.”

This set me thinking — why not? If we can use business templates, if we can have outsourcing services like ghost-writing to produce a debut book, if we can have stenographers to take dictations and business calls, an accountant to do all the bookkeeping, wedding planners and yes, even “thank you note” writing services for happy-busy brides, what’s so wrong with getting someone to place a call to your mom, even if for a lark!

momSourcing Mom Sourcing could be a prank, but the outsourcing idea rocks

Don’t we plan surprise B’ Day parties for our loved ones? Haven’t you ever prompted a sibling to call up Mom “immediately” because she sounded “so low” on phone a while ago?

I analyzed that what makes mom-sourcing.co.in so offending to a few relationship-conscious people is not that it’s a paid service (don’t you pay the florist for the bouquet, or shell out money for a personal gift?) but because someone completely unrelated, a virtual stranger is calling up your mom and making an intimate call, that ideally you should be making.

That of course would be an ideal way to handle things. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where emergencies, exigencies do have to be factored in. You could be on a long haul flight, caught up in an emergency business meeting, performing a surgery, attending to a sick child, or just not in the mood to sound “chirpy and cheerful” that morning, especially if you have a ‘difficult’ relationship with your parent and want some ice-breaker, before you begin to mend the bridges.

What do you do in such a situation? Make a grumpy call? Don’t make a call? Or outsource it to a “relationship manager” as mom-sourcing.co.in proclaims its staff to be.

I don’t know about you, but I would choose the latter. In this Internet-era everything is outsourced including your own life.

Related posts:

  1. Decoding the lexicon: backshoring, reverse outsourcing, insourcing or rural-sourcing?
  2. Managing Teamwork – Key to Successful Offshore Operations
  3. Outsourcing transcends industries
  4. When disaster strikes an outsourcing hub: Manila & Mumbai
  5. Boutique Players Likely To Play A Big Role In India’s Outsourcing


Written by admin · Filed Under Outsource Blogs 

Comments

Got something to say?