Ever have one of those weeks where you wish you could just pay someone else to do your work for you?

Well, this was that week for me. And thanks to the miracle of globalization, I can make that wish come true.

That's right -- I'm officially outsourcing next week's column to India.

Thanks to the Internet, outsourcing is no longer the domain of the rich, famous and corporate. Instead, Indian outsourcing companies now offer to do pretty much anything for the right price, from setting up appointments to writing advertising copy to doing research. The idea is to "follow the sun" -- to have an Indian assistant work while you sleep and have the results waiting for you in your e-mail inbox the next morning.

This new wave of outsourcing doesn't just target big businesses. Working professionals are the new audience. One site, for instance, asks, "Are you a busy CPA?" right on its front page.

Of course, I'm not a CPA. I just want someone to write one column, hopefully on the cheap.

Books such as Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat and Timothy Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek have covered the outsourcing topic pretty extensively, so I used them as a starting point for my outsourcing quest.

Both books specifically recommend a company called Brickwork. In addition, I contacted a number of other companies that I found through Google, including Chillibreeze, Editing Writing Services and contentwriter.in.

All of these companies offer at least some kind of writing services. Contentwriter.in, for example, features travel writing, article writing and blog writing.

They also offer ghostwriting services: They write it, but you get to put your name on it. Don't have any moral qualms about violating Penn State's academic integrity policies? Forget stealing term papers -- just hire someone in India to write a brand-new one.

Editing Writing Services (given that the name seems to be conspicuously missing a conjunction in the title, I'm a little suspicious of what their quality of work is going to be like) probably has the most comprehensive services of the group, including a very interesting "creative writing" section.

According to the service's description, "Give us the smallest or the simplest of story ideas and we will develop them in a manner that will leave you surprised and surely asking for more."

I know a lot of native English speakers who can't do that. Pretty impressive.

Most of these sites have some kind of form to fill out to request services. This is what I sent them:

"This is a one-time task. I need someone to write a brief column of about 400 words about a topic of interest to college students. The writer can pick the specific topic. This column will appear in a student newspaper. Please do not spend more than two hours on this task. Please give me a price quote before beginning this task."

Within hours, I got two responses: one from Brickwork and one from contentwriter.in. Brickwork said they'd contact me within two business days for more information. Contentwriter.in gave me a price quote right off the bat: $28.

I'm still waiting to see if any of the other price quotes are lower before I make a decision about who to hire, but that sounds like a pretty reasonable price. Tune in next week to see the results.

Ryan Pfister is a senior majoring information sciences and technology and economics and is the Collegian's Monday columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@psu.edu.