An Open Letter to the Handybook App

Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: The A... Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: The P...

An Open Letter to the Handybook App

Dear Handybook App:

Hi, how are you? See, that first sentence is what we humans like to call, “being friendly.” Sure, it’s got a tinge of insincerity – I mean, if you’re buggy, if you’re running slow, if you have any of the other minor problems that I’m sure plague smartphone apps – I don’t really want all the details, unless there’s something I can do to help you. I say, “how are you?” You say, “Fine.” It’s a little ritual of civility that makes the day less impersonal.

But you’d know all about impersonal, wouldn’t you? I read about you in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle called “App lets users hire house cleaners, handymen without talking.” It described how your twenty-something inventors came up with you, an app that lets people hire other people without all the awkwardness that comes from talking to them.

As the young founder of your company says, and I quote: “If you want someone to go through the process of scrubbing the mold off the top left corner of the shower because you’re too busy or lazy to do it yourself, it’s really hard to ask that person, particularly if you’re 22, you’ve never had the responsibility of employing someone your whole life, you’ve interned two places and now you’re asking someone to do this for you.”

Wow. And people wonder why the working class residents of San Francisco resent the arrival of their new techie overlords.

I’m going to say right from the get-go that I applaud the idea behind you. Anything that removes friction between supply of services and demand for them is useful for all parties. What I take issue with is what, in modern marketing lingo, is called the Pain Point that you purport to solve: having to talk to people you hire face to face. And since I’m trying to honor my “What Would Tami Taylor Do?” mantra, I wanted to talk to y’all directly about the type of bad behavior you facilitate.

First of all, if one of your users has mold on the top left corner of his shower, (I’ll use the masculine pronoun because we all understand that you are designed to appeal to young men,) and he is so awkward or self-important that he doesn’t want to take a moment to explain to his housecleaner that it needs addressing, there are products sold in stores – helpfully labelled “Cleaning Products”- that HE can use to clean the shower. It’ll take him five minutes, tops, and then he can get back to his Very Important Life.

But if he does decide to pay someone else to scrub his mold, then I’d suggest that twenty-two years old is the perfect age to start practicing talking to people who are on different rungs of the socioeconomic ladder than him – and that ladder doesn’t just go upward.

If your typical customer has only interned two places in his whole life and yet still has enough money to hire a housecleaner, I’m going to surmise that he has just been sprung from a nice college or university where he probably didn’t have many opportunities to talk to people with life circumstances vastly different from his own. And I’ll surmise further that any awkward conversations during the eighteen years prior to that with cleaners, plumbers, electricians, and other scary people were handled by Mom and Dad.

But Baby Bird has to fly sometime. He has to have a couple of blushy, stumbling conversations with people he has hired to do work for him. Some will understand what he wants, and will do more than he knows to ask. Those are the service providers whose cards he’ll keep. Others will know he’s confused and will take advantage of him. That’s ok; learning comes from both good and bad experiences.

Handybook app, I don’t want to be dramatic. But by making it possible to avoid conversations with the people who do things your customers can’t, or choose not to do themselves denies them a moment of connection, of learning, of simple human empathy. Sometimes those interactions remind you how much you have in common with people who are different from you.

Other times they teach you something entirely new. For instance, when I was at the Grammys last month and Juanes took the stage, I knew who he was thanks to my once-a-month cleaning ladies, Jacky and Mari, who blast his music while they work. We have conversations about their music that are confused by our respective lack of fluency in each other’s respective languages, but we laugh and gesticulate and agree about Juanes, and that’s exactly the little spark of humanity you, Handybook, make it dangerously easy to miss. (By the way, I hired Jacky and Mari through Natural Home Cleaning, a company with a mission to provide healthy, dignified work to low-income immigrant women, in partnership with WAGES. Do your developers ever mention that kind of thing?)

We live in an age where it’s gotten so easy to hide behind technology, to use it to separate rather than unite, that old folks like me wonder where simple civility is headed. Your very existence tells me that I’m not overreacting.

Don’t take this too personally, I know you didn’t ask to be invented. You probably would have been just as happy, maybe happier, had your 1s and 0s been used to solve real social problems and create meaningful connections, in the way of some of the best technology implementations out there. Maybe you yearn to be the next DonorsChoose or CitizenshipWorks.

If that’s the case, may I suggest a small act of disbedience? Next time someone tries to book a service over you, so that they don’t have to experience the pain of human interaction:

Switch to FaceTime mode.

Best regards,

Nancy