I’ll give you $30 an hour, a laptop, and tell you you can work anywhere in the world with the internet. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll let you do work as easy as being a customer service agent for the Wall Street Journal, answering your cellphone to manage or cancel the caller’s subscription.
Would you take it? I’ll bet you would. Easy stuff! Even for 15 bucks — three or four times the hourly wage of most of the planet — I’ll bet you’d take it.
And it means you don’t have to wear any pants, have an apoplectic fit in rush hour traffic in 6 inches of snow, pay for a lot of expensive gasoline, and hell, maybe you could even sit there plugging boring data into a boring spreadsheet while watching girls in hula dresses wiggle on the beach outside your window in Bali. And when you’re on break, you can say “Hey” instead of going to Taco Bell at Ridgedale Mall.
Who would reject this offer? Not me. Probably not you.
I know digital nomads cause housing problems, but put yourself in their shoes. You’d take that offer! They also bring a lot of money to people who need it. This isn’t black and white.
A true story about the Wall Street Journal: 9, I had to call and cancel my subscript during Covidien. I needed the money.
I was prepared to hear a cranky, combative Queens accent on the other end of the line, interrogating me about my subscription, giving me 17 chances not to cancel.
Instead, I got the sweetest Alabama woman answering the call with a cheerful moonlight magnolia drawl — “Howdy, this is WILMA MAE for the Wall Street Journal, what can Ah do for ya today?” — and her kids laughing in the background.
Technically, she was a digital nomad, probably in Birmingham or Mobile.
But I don’t know why she couldn’t have done it from a balcony with sea breezes in Playa del Carmen.
