A job that is worth waiting for Sally Casley is fairly representative of the types of clients she has on her books: comfortably affluent but not uber-wealthy. Despite a former life as a banker, she is very unflashy - no Chelsea penthouse or sports car. Nonetheless, as befits her old career, she is evidently single-minded and determined. Her focus contrasts sharply with that of Anna (not her real name), one of her part-time employees. The mature Italian student feels like she is cast adrift. I'm not particularly proud of the fact that I've not had a definite job for one-and-a-half years. I feel as if I'm a bit floating around," she says. Hence, the reason for not wanting to be identified: "I don't want to advertise it to the world." Ms Casley founded WaitingIn, a housesitting service that sends people such as Anna to wait in for emergency plumbers, television repairers and furniture or grocery deliveries, so that time-starved professionals do not have to take time off work to wait. Ms Casley's biggest concern when she was mulling her business plan last year while still at JPMorgan, the investment bank, was whether she could "find the right kind of people to do this job for the minimum wage." The answer, it turned out, was "overwhelmingly yes." The people on her books, she says, "are hugely overqualified." It is a sign of the deteriorating economy that many of them are middle-class people trying to top up their wages from part-time work or retirees keen for extra income. Few, she says, want to be identified in print. "Going on record as earning the minimum wage is something they are not entirely happy with," she ex­plains. Housesitting is something they do to make ends meet in difficult times, but they are not really comfortable with being defined as a house-sitter. As 43-year-old Anna puts it: "It is a strange job - a new type of working situation. It's an exclusive service for a few that can afford it. I would love to be one of them - to be able to go out to work every day. It's a sign of society that other people are doing the small jobs that others don't have time to do. Nonetheless, she is grateful for the chance to do her studies while being paid. "I don't look down on myself for doing it," she says. It's only temporary. At the end of the day you get a few pounds for doing nothing. Ms Casley sees the work as a new form of domestic service. Her target market is not, however, the wealthy who have staff - it is rather for the middle classes who employ weekly cleaners and personal trainers. And as with all domestic services, people considering using her company have an internal battle in their head: "They are wary of paying out for things they can do for themselves." She admits that she would have been more successful in 2006 when the economy was booming. However, for Yorkshire-born Ms Casley, recruiting such waiting-in staff has proved a welcome relief from the politics of investment banking. She left the prime brokerage department of the bank last year when she realised she would never get a top job. Domestic services 2.0 While popular television series Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, depicting the lives of butlers and baronets, may seem like scenes from a faraway world, domestic services are just as popular now as they once were. Few domestic workers live in employers" houses today, however. Many are self-employed or freelancers providing services such as housesitting, dog-walking or cleaning. According to the UK Office for National Statistics" latest issue of "Consumer Trends," total UK household spending on domestic and household services in 2010 was £7.34bn. Sub-contracting can go beyond domestic tasks such as cleaning or childcare. Timothy Ferris, author of The 4-hour Work Week, even outsourced his romantic life by asking virtual assistants to find dates for him. A.J. Jacobs, meanwhile, editor-at-large of Esquire magazine, hired a team in India to undertake tasks such as planning a party for his wife, reading his emails and answering his phone. He even paid one to take responsibility for his anxieties. "The outsourcing of my neuroses was one of the most successful experiments," he says. Every time I started to ruminate [on a business deal that was taking a long time], I'd remind myself that Honey was already on the case and I'd relax. "I loved [my career] for the most part," she says. But the investment banks talk a good game about diversity. Very few women reach the top. There's no open sexist jokes, I've never been made to go to lap dancing clubs, but the attitude is still there - it's just hidden. I realised you had to be male to achieve [a managing director position] and the kind of person I didn't want to be - hugely political and willing to trample on everyone and anyone in order to succeed. Yet the bonus culture is such that she stayed longer than she had intended. "In banking you get sucked into bonuses - it's very hard to say "This is the point I'm going to leave." It's very hard to walk away from - the money sucks you in. It's completely arbitrary, the figure. But I've been really fortunate with bonuses and worked hard for it. There are some years that are quiet and some that are "wow, that's fantastic."" The final step came when her boss "made it clear he didn't want me to be part of the team. He wanted men in a very male-dominated, jokey, drinking culture sales team - I didn't complain. I started looking how to get out. Waiting in had been a service she had been pondering for some time. Whenever she had a delivery at home, Ms Casley and her husband (a banker who she met at Lehman Brothers and who she describes as "the only good thing to have come out of that bank as far as I'm concerned") would take turns to take a day's holiday or persuade their bosses to let them work from home. What she loves about her new working life is the freedom to make her own decisions ("working in a bank, you can't do anything without going up the hierarchy") and is pleased to be free of the 7.45am start of her working day. While she would never say never about a return to banking she is pleased to have a break. The easy days have gone. Investment banking is hard going at the moment - all my friends are worried about their jobs," she says.