Finally. As people keep noticing, now people who don't really need personal assistants can act like they do, thanks to South Asia. New offshore personal-assistant services in Bangalore are available to cater to your rinky-dink small-business needs, the Times reiterates today.

You can have them do things like "conduct research, monitor the Web, make appointments and even give [you] a wake-up call and tell [you] to get some exercise." All this can be yours for $15 an hour!

But buyer beware: sometimes this veritable army of Girl Fridays can be a little rough around the edges, as the Indians "don't always have the greatest client service skills or business acumen or accents." (That's not true! The guy who called me three times last week demanding that I pay my overdue credit-card bill had a perfect accent).

An "entrepreneur" who hired one of them to "book him a cheap trip to India, perhaps using local knowledge" was unhappy when his slacker PA simply emailed a list of prices from Travelocity. Now he's totally out 30 bucks.

What's with this trend? Oh, we know who to blame: "Like many others using the services, Ms. Levy was inspired by two books: Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat" and Timothy Ferriss's "The 4-Hour Workweek." Aren't we all!