Hate to Wait? Hire Someone Else to Do It

Somewhere between efficiency and laziness lies an entire industry dedicated to making money off other people's mundane tasks.

Annoyed by, lacking time for and dreading minutiae, the harried masses have created a need for professional hagglers, line standers and personal concierge services that will, among other things, wait around for the cable guy. Some are born out of demand, but a special few derive from the sloth of founders like John Evangelista.

While attending Seton Hall University in 1993, Evangelista stopped by a drug store to pick up a last-minute Valentine's Day gift for his girlfriend. He bought cheap flowers and a stuffed orangutan, and tried to pass it off as the most original idea in the history of romance. His girlfriend broke up with him two days later, but left him with the idea for Dumpmonkey.com.

"One of my friends asked me if I was trying to break up with my girlfriend," Evangelista said. "He coined the phrase Dumpmonkey when he told me afterward 'you gave her a dump monkey, what did you expect?'"

Ten years later, Evangelista began his Web-based dumping service. For $24.95, Evangelista's Boston-based company will send your former loved one a 36-inch stuffed monkey, a certificate of that monkey's authenticity from Dump University (Dump U) and a letter making the break-up official.

"A lot of our business is people sending it to other people as a joke, but we've done breakups, divorces, people sending Dumpmonkeys to kick cancer out of people's lives," he says.

Lisa Ristorucci and her Los Angeles-based crew of Gofer Girls have learned to be similarly flexible with their personal concierge service. The company, founded to assist people "who already have personal assistants," has done everything from fetch groceries to get a client's Golden Globe Awards dress fitted on a similarly sized Gofer Girl.

"Somebody once called to see if we could get them a pack of cigarettes," she says. "Once they found out it was a $30-an-hour service with a one-hour minimum, they were like, 'Oh, OK.'"