Esquire magazine’s A.J. Jacobs once hired an assistant, Asha, from an Indian outsourcing firm called Your Man in India to do some online shopping and other mundane tasks. Asha performed every task flawlessly, with one minor exception: a hitch in a drugstore order. “Instead of wax paper, we got wax-strip mustache removers for ladies,” Jacobs recalled. “My wife was insulted.”