Lackey Luster

"Lackey: 1. A male servant of low rank, usually in some sort of livery or uniform. 2. A follower who carries out another's orders like a servant; toady." - Webster's New World Dictionary.

Here's what one learns from being a lackey in Seattle:

People will pay you to do almost anything. Like the time a college student asked MyLackey.com to transcribe a series of interviews with a mortician.

Or the time MyLackey driver Lorenzo Cisneros, 24, spent two hours waiting in line for a woman who wanted to register her child for preschool. It amazes Cisneros, the variety of things people will spend money to have lackeys do.

Being a lackey is an ideal job for an observer of the human animal, he says. Or at least the twenty- to thirtysomething, professional, mostly single variety of it - the main type of MyLackey customer so far.

And the major thing Cisneros has observed about the young Seattle breed of human animal?

"People are very, very quick to spend their money these days," he says.

Ah, right.

These days, time is more important than money, especially in dot-com land, where work seems to have consumed people's lives. At the same time, things that were once unattainable luxuries have been made, if not affordable, then copyable.

And that is why MyLackey is occupying its perfect moment in this time and place.

If the 1950s were about keeping up with the Joneses, then the 2000s are about keeping up with fantasies. Live the celebrity life - InStyle and E! show you how! Who wants to be a millionaire? Me! Me! Me! (Would a million even be enough these days?) Don't have millions? Well, buy the Target version.

It all leads to certain . . . expectations. If Oprah can have her own personal trainer and a personal chef, why can't we have our own more-affordable versions run our errands and clean our homes?

"It's so millennium!" says Cathy Shoaf, director of marketing for MyLackey. "Why should you have to go to the dry cleaners? We can pick it up, deliver it to you."

Seattleite Eric Whitelaw, 30, uses MyLackey for everything from dry cleaning to car detailing, housecleaning, and sending Valentine's Day bouquets to his grandmother in Florida. Whitelaw is co-founder of Photozone.com, which photographs events and posts them online.

"Most people think you have to be rich to have someone clean your house. That's a hurdle to get past," he says. "You do have to have some amount of disposable income to justify having someone come to your house and clean it, but these things aren't so out of reach as they used to be. We have so many choices now and so many options that weren't affordable before. We now can pick and choose which options we want for our life. And that's incredible power."

Personal-service companies that deliver videos or do the shopping for you, like MyLackey, HomeGrocer.com and Kozmo.com, are "a natural outcome of structural changes going on in our society," says Eugene Rosa, a professor of sociology at Washington State University who specializes in human-technological interactions.

The economy is good, people have more money and the Web makes it a snap to find things you didn't even know you needed. Voila! An instant market. "There's a latent demand for such services," Rosa says.

But expect unintended consequences should these service-at-our-door companies succeed. They could present more opportunities for those already working as gardeners or housecleaners - or put them out of business. Or it could mean that having people clean your house or drive you around would no longer signify upper-class status. These companies could well be "democratizing" for society, Rosa says.

In any case, as people get used to paying for such services, they may increasingly start asking for a wider variety of formerly private, personal things, he says.

Chris Ostlund, 31, another MyLackey driver, already sees this happening.

There was the time he served as go-between in a dispute in which one person had supposedly damaged the property of another party. They didn't want to talk to each other, Ostlund said, so they gave him the money to act as go-between.

"I could see giving someone $40 if I didn't want to face an ex-wife in the case of a divorce," he muses.

Then there was the time someone saw him in the MyLackey uniform on the street and asked him to get a dead rat out of a crawl space. (That was a no-go. Treading on animal-control territory. But most things within the realm of reason and legality the company will strive to do.)

Housecleaning, auto detailing, delivering pet food, lawn mowing, mobile massages, wood chopping, on-site massages, transcribing mortician interviews - the list grows. Coming soon: mobile manicures, pedicures, facials.

Prices range from about $5.95 for dress-shirt dry cleaning, to $25 an hour for the first hour for odd jobs such as gift wrapping or waiting for the cable company, to $340 for a 10-passenger stretch limousine service.

The more money people get, it seems, the more things they don't have time for.

Which suits the lackeys just fine. More business for them.

But at a time when the economy is booming, why would people want to become lackeys?

"I used to work in a warehouse, with the same situation all day," says Ostlund, who like the other field lackeys gets about $14 an hour. "This job I get to meet a variety of people. You can work 12 hours a day and the time flies. It's borderline fun."

And one other minor point: The lackeys get stock options. Chris has 1,000. Kinda wreaks havoc with that whole servant underclass model.

That lackey cleaning your toilet? Could be employing you one of these days.

But on the way to being IPOed and set for life, there's that word to live with: "lackey." How does that sit with these guys?

(A bit of background: In the late 19th century, a shocker of an August Strindberg play had the aristocratic Miss Julie killing herself after a tryst with her lackey.)

So does anyone find it, you know, demeaning to be called a lackey?

Everyone (more than 70 employees) at MyLackey.com is called a lackey of one type or another. There are driver lackeys, housecleaning lackeys. Co-founder Brian McGarvey is called Chief Lackey. There's also a Chief Financial Lackey, Deal Lackey, Code Lackey, Brand Lackey.

Seems the rethinking has even worked on the public. "Sometimes on the streets, when I'm in my uniform or getting out of the van, I've heard people say: `Oh, it's MyLackey.com!' Like they're on the verge of getting my autograph or something," says Ostlund.

Here's the thing: At a time when a memorable name is worth millions, "lackey" certainly gets its point across.

"My generation probably takes less offense to things like that," says Whitelaw of Photozone.com. "People are always looking for new ways to say things, present things. We're fairly numb to how gimmicky things can be these days."

Besides, the glamour of that whole "being able to afford your own servant" thing kind of rubs off, in an "I was Madonna's housekeeper and am writing a tell-all book" sort of way.

So are companies like MyLackey creating a nation of lazybones who can no longer do their own chores, or is this another creation, like the fax machine or cell phone, that was supposed to make our life easier, give us more time to concentrate on the things that matter?

At Eproject.com, an online service allowing business colleagues to collaborate on everything from charts to calendars, "we tell people: We know you're busy, and the last thing you want to worry about is having your car cleaned or your skis waxed," says Kneale Culbreath, 33, executive assistant. That's why the company gives MyLackey gift certificates to employees, and has lackeys come by to pick up dry cleaning and car detailing.

Culbreath herself has had her car detailed and house and clothing cleaned by the lackeys.

"I love the idea that they take care of things I don't want to do so I can take care of other things," she says. "I don't think it's making me lazier. In fact, it's helping me to be more productive."

"It's the nature of the dot-com beast - long hours," says field lackey Cisneros. "Whoever's going to put in more time to be there is going to come out ahead. That's where we come in. We allow people to stay at work longer."

Will the joys of the 21st century never cease?

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Funky facts from MyLackey.com:

-- Pounds of laundry picked up and delivered: 7,450

-- Biggest dog walked: 120 pounds

-- Number of carpets vacuumed: 1,398

-- Number of wheels scrubbed and treated: 1,244

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