he day before my friends and I were due to leave for our UK holiday, the host of the Airbnb cancelled. It was a dark, yet fitting end to our simple holiday dream of five best girlfriends in a cottage, tipsily affirming each other with internet slogans (“You do you, hunny!”) and bonding through collective eye-rolling at men. Planning the trip was anything but simple: weeks of trawling through identical booking websites, negotiating in exhausting and fruitless email chains, trying not to take offence at the faux fun listings: “Come and stay at our quirky cottage!” It might as well have read: “You cannot use the kitchen and you have to feed our aggressive cat. You’ll need to pay for logs, because warmth is not provided, but threadbare towels begrudgingly are. Please clean the house so it is nicer than when you arrived. If you need anything, we cannot help, because we’ll be staying in the family castle. All for the low cost of a night in the Shard.” “I wish there was someone to do all this for us,” my friend lamented. “That job existed once: they were called travel agents,” I said as we oohed and ahhed the way we would in a museum, viewing a sultan’s gold and marvelling at a former society’s riches. Adulthood is full of traps; I learn this more each day. But doing for nothing the work companies used to pay people to do – outsourcing their jobs to the public and pretending we should be grateful for the “convenience” – might be the greatest trick of all. So I’m calling work where I see it. After all, how can we find work-life balance when so much work is masquerading as life? Although it does mean that my cottage retreat will have to wait a little longer: I’m taking a holiday from planning the holiday. Even travel agents need a break.