Experience with TaskRabbit
February 10, 2012
I got quite sick of doing the buy/install/configure dance with the Wisepill devices for Project ARemind.
Here’s what I did to get things done /way/ more efficiently and effectively zero stress (mostly from Jon’s suggestions so thanks goes to him):
When buying a ton of prepaid simcards (US):
- Go to a t-mobile store (brick and mortar, not the hot dog stand variety)
- Ask them for N prepaid sims, do not forget to mention that you need to administrate them remotely!
- Ask nicely that they prepare the sim cards for you:
- If they could sign up to the t-mobile online account for each SIM for you)
- If they can set up pre-paid (i.e. it drops $10 into the account each month or whatever)
- Hand them your corporate credit card, let them know they should keep it for the duration and swipe as neccessary
- Sign off for the first sim card
- Go have coffee.
- You now have N sim cards purchased, set up, and ready to rumble!
For the Wisepill devices there’s a lot of steps to go through to get them ready for use:
- Unscrew four (not phillips, not flat head, not hex, some special screw, smaller than a regular PC Case screw) screws
- pop in the sim card
- Connect the device up to your PC for programming
- Program it (the software is finicky and needs to be restarted 1 time out of 4)
- Disconnect and trigger the Wisepill
- Wait.
- See if a message arrived where you expected it (from the Number you expected)
- Re-screw the screws
It’s boring and painful.
Enter: TaskRabbit!
I got a taskrabbiter to do the wisepill thing less than 20 minutes after putting out the ad (sign up and setting up the ad was deliciously easy). I had some basic instructions written up. When she arrived, I showed her how to do what needed to be done (including entering the numbers into a spreadsheet AND labelling!). It took her ~4.5 hours and we paid $120.
Now I can spend all that saved time worrying about getting a visa to Nigeria. Win win!
Thanks for reading!
Anton
Written by
Dimagi
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