I Tried to Pay an Online Essay Writing Service to Write This Article

Journalism is hard. It involves medium hours, not great pay if you aspire to be properly middle class, and plenty of writing. Type-type-fucking-type. It’s exhausting. Even getting to line three of this piece has basically knobbled me. But what if there were a better way? What if the likes of me didn’t have to mop our brows any more? What, for instance, if there were a man in India who could do all this for me?

The call centres went East years ago. Legal and accounts services have since followed. Now, the increasingly popular act of university students paying people in India to write their coursework offers a third wave of outsource. So, when I was asked to write about student essay services, it took all of nine seconds to work out how this article would be pieced together: I was going to use one of the student essay services to do it for me.

Choosing the wallah to carry your sedan chair isn’t always easy though. No sooner had I relinquished the reins of writing, than I found myself in the hated world of management. I was a supervisor now, an editor, if you will. I had to find some dude in Gujarat who was content to prostitute his intellect for 120 rupees an hour. And I needed it to be good. Or else I’d probably have to kill myself.

Well, I’d probably have to write the bulk of the article at the very least.

Initial inquiries proved exhausting. “Oh hi. Are you phoning from Australia?” I asked the rep from Oxbridge Essays – who had a strong Indian accent – when an Oz number flashed up on my phone. “That’s right, Melbourne Australia, sir,” he said. I hadn’t the heart to tell him it was half past midnight in Melbourne Australia.

Another company claimed they were in Oxford Circus. “Oh cool, do you ever go into Liberty’s?” I asked, innocently enough. “I am not authorised to discuss this with you sir,” he blanked back. When I pointed out their company address was actually an off-the-peg PO Box on Regent Street, he unilaterally terminated our livechat. Tough crowd.

In the end, there was nothing for it but to dive in. I found, at random, a company called Essay Writing Lab. Plenty of pleasing UX features on the website. The logo was a laboratory beaker. Great, good, fine.

I selected from a rubric. I’d need a thousand words. They priced per-250. It should probably be done to “Undergraduate Standard” (for more money, they offer Masters and PhD too). That should be fine, given that the average VICE reader apparently has a reading age of a 13-year-old. But to counter-balance that tightness, I’d go for “Platinum Quality”. And it would be an “essay”, not “coursework”, or indeed a “dissertation”. Annoyingly, there was no option for “Nobel Prize”. Again, to keep costs low, I gave them a lazy timescale of a week (they offer to do it in 24 hours). I chose my citation style, entered the genre as "business studies", and as my PayPal account drained of real hard-earned money, I couldn’t help but feel elated.

The sales operator on the livechat told me my topic was doable. “Most of our writers have a PhD level of education,” he said. In fact he called the assignment “a piece of cake”.

To make quite sure, I wrote quite a hefty synopsis, offering my man in Bangalore what the ad world call "the freedom of a tight brief". Here it is:

Seemed easy enough. I pictured my writer, with whom I was encouraged to communicate through my login on the site, praising the day I’d arrived. This would be baby-candy for him. Write what you know, right?

Not only that, this would be his chance to tell the world how he’d been wronged. Finally, he could work on that great memoir of human suffering he’d been rewriting in his head while he toiled, eyes raw, spine coiled like a question mark, fingers knotty corals of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

Tragically, though, it turns out you just can’t get good help nowadays. Seven days later, I received an email through the site. My outboard brain was having difficulties. He requested an extension, saying he couldn’t find enough reference material.

I happily granted him one: “Yeah sure bud. Take a bit more time. But also – look inside your heart. What's the latest on when you could have it by?”

“I will deliver in 14 hours time,” he said, with interesting precision. Buddy, you should have stayed in bed. Fourteen hours later, I was in receipt of 1136 words, 60 percent of them incomprehensible.

Selected lowlights? Hard to choose. Certainly, the OED-centric opening is the sort of thing that would sink the heart of any academic marker faster than the Bismarck.

(Curtis & Shani, 2002, is actually a paper called “The Effect Of Taking Term-Time Employment On Students”. Judge for yourself whether that citation is even warranted.)

The writer then goes on to note that:

Which is the sort of awesomely dumb tautology I last saw the one afternoon I decided to flick through a Derrida reader.

“Global village?” What are you, Al Gore in 1999? Come on, mate, even BBC Click can do better futurology than that. But it gets worse:

Having just wasted 37 words in a semantic clinch that would have Gottlob Frege chewing through his pencil, he moves on to perhaps the best of the bunch. There’s something quite poetic about this next part. It twines various different strands of dumbness into one thick rope of stupidity. It’s… well, see for yourself.

“According to statistics?” Why didn’t I ever think of that?

And that closing line? Given that the Japanese Yen is 124 to the Dollar I’d suppose it’s even more lucrative there.

Having made me hate him, though, like any literary master, my courseworker would now turn on the sympathy. This is what they call "arc". It’s Othello turned from proud Moor to addled murderer. It’s Walter White going from schmuckish chemistry dork to psycho meth Grand Poobah. Here it was: the memoir of human sufferings, the Primo Levi money shot, the Solzhenitsyn kicker, the soul laid bare.

Right. So, he was suffering from impaired judgement due to extreme sleep deprivation.

It made me take stock. I had, in a very conceited way, assumed his conditions to be equal to mine. Instead, here he was, the digital version of a myopic widow darning socks by candlelight. Every day, hustling.

Bootstrapping together first year sociology essays about the influence of Little Mix on teenage sexuality. Sports science majors’ dissertations on Wayne Rooney’s Elastoplasts. Endless repetitive punching-in of the phrase "the medium is the message". What must he think about our dumbed-down culture, hosed down every day with the sewer pipe ex-Polytechnics training C-students to work in marketing for banks? The horror.

The. Horror.

I had come quick to anger, and I had been nothing but wrong in that. Now, there was nothing left but to humble myself, to entrust my happiness to this more enlightened soul. I’d asked, after all, for Essay Writing Lab to round out the hot take with a little moral takeaway. Was paid essay writing cheating the system, as it appeared? Or was it… not, for some weird reason, subject to the same ethical constraints as the rest of civilisation? As ever, my man had an answer, and it was pretty obvious when you thought about it.

None of which scrambled syntax and floppy logic allowed me to directly copy-paste this junk over into my editor’s CMS. Aye, sure, scamming lecturers and every honest student is fine, pal. Whatever. But scamming me? You prick.

@gavhaynes