What Happened to House Calls?

Just five years ago, I was ordering from Webvan and Kozmo weekly. When I was my daughter's age, we had a milkman deliver dairy products to our door. A generation or two before, doctors made house calls. Now, it's like pulling teeth to get anyone to come to my home to help me out. What gives?

My predicament is this: I've been on modified bed rest for about a year and on top of the obvious inconvenient aspects of that situation, I've found it incredibly difficult to get people to come to my home - even those who advertise that they will.

I wanted an attorney to update our estate plan. One woman said she would come over and meet with me. She wiggled out of that by stalling, and months later I received a phone call from her assistant asking if we were ready to meet at her office. We still haven't been able to add our daughter officially to our wills. We found a social worker to help with some of our family adjustment issues, but her schedule had hardly any room to make it.

I called a cranial sacral (specialized massage type) therapist who she said she would find a way to make room in her schedule to come over and she never called me back. Scheduling physical therapists and personal trainers becomes a liability issue, so that was a lost cause. We tried to schedule a veterenarian visit for our cats since getting them to the vet hasn't happened in way too long, and she's not available for two months. Safeway.com would be great if they actually delivered more than one-third of what they sell in their stores. And don't even get me started on the people who are always supposed to come to your home like "handymen". They aren't so handy if they blow you off three days in a row.

I've found a couple massage therapists who will come to the home, but at this point, that's the one thing I feel I can handle somewhere else. I can lie on a table away from my cluttered house, forget about the mounting piles of crap for a few hours, and relax. Not to mention that I have yet to find a really excellent massage therapist who will come to the home. Decent ones - sure, but I have reason to be picky.

It's not like I haven't offered to pay these people for their transit time. I'd rather not, of course, because we certainly don't have money for them when we're paying for childcare/mother's helpers nearly around the clock (a topic for another day), but it would be worth it to get the help we need. Everyone's just too busy. So much for the service industry or caring for your customer.

I can't even think about attempting to contact luxury service providers like a home pedicure. And there's certainly no point in hiring a personal shopper to come meet with me when I never go out anywhere I could wear new clothes. But even if I did, I'm too exhausted from trying to convince people to come over.