Experience with TaskRabbit

February 10, 2012; 2 min read

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

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