At your service, any time, any task

Already there were plenty of motorcycles delivering all sorts of items usually guaranteed to arrive at their destination in less than an hour. And there are more than enough “substitute drivers” offering drunk car owners rides back home in their own vehicles 24 hours a day.

But Yoon thinks these services are not enough to tend to the needs of the so-called “can’t-botherists,” who, of course, are those suffering from “can’t-botherism” (both are popular words in Korea). Hence, the arrival of the instead-man.

“This is a market that the consumers have created, and there are almost no limits to what products can be marketed and those who can supply it,” Yoon said.

He has at least 200 professional instead-men and numerous part-timers on stand-by all across the country, allowing his company to cover a vast area and still operate efficiently.

Anyman, the name indicating that its instead-men will do anything, has seen an unimaginable variety of service requests from its clients.

Asking for food delivery from a distant place that sometimes entails double the price of the food itself as a service fee is nothing unusual. Some customers in the countryside have even asked that cosmetics or purchases of famous food from Seoul be packed onto express buses and trains for pickup.

University students have asked instead-men to sit in their classes for them and even elementary school students have called in to have art supplies delivered to their school gates.

Instead-men say that some of the requests can be quite touching as well. Gruff husbands call in to have porridge and medicine sent over to their sick wives, and one woman even asked if an older instead-man could accompany her elderly father on a fishing trip for two days.

But the work is, of course, not always pleasant.

“I was once asked to fish out a dead decomposing cat from between two brick walls, and I politely declined,” said professional instead-man Cho Sang-hee.

Cho rushed out in mid-conversation to the nearest cosmetics store, after getting a call asking that four packs of false eyelashes be delivered to a beauty salon.

“I guess you could say I’ve bought almost every single item a woman would at a drug store,” Cho said, before speeding off on his motorcycle.

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