Have apps, will travel: How handy are they really?

• Munchery.com: Available for iPhone only and online.

• Postmates.com: Available for iPhone and Android.

• Drizly.com: Available for iPhone and Android and online.

• Caviar (trycaviar.com): Online only.

• Taskrabbit.com: Available for iPhone and Android, and online.

• Zirx.com: Available for iPhone and Android.

SEATTLE — Need a shirt sewn? Want a tasty meal pre-made and delivered to your house? What about alcohol delivery services, you ask, hung over, from the edge of your bed, because you need hair of the dog? There’s even an app to park your car — as in, someone will park your car for you.

These apps seem to have been created by and for the same audience: young, busy men in tech, most of whom are experiencing their first years away from Mother Doing Everything for Them, and don’t yet have a Girlfriend Who Will Do Everything for Them. They pledge a life of convenience: (Postmates’ website even states, “Time Is Money,” and there’ll be “more hours in the day for coding, strategizing, meetings, exercise and happy hour.”)

Recently, I was leaving first thing Friday afternoon for a long weekend trip, but I didn’t have any time to get ready. Since I haven’t figured out how to clone myself, I wanted to see how easy apps could make my life, especially since I had exactly a day to prepare.

• 10-11:15 a.m., TaskRabbit. TaskRabbit is sort of like GPS-enabled-Craigslist-on-Demand. You choose the service (cleaning, for instance), plug in your location and flick through several different Rabbit profiles, complete with pictures and reviews. My kitchen was a mess, I had a couple of nagging chores, and I also needed to pack. Instead of trying to do everything on Thursday night, a TaskRabbit would be able to do some of those things while I packed. I picked Ashley, a silver fox, who had 11 happy customers to his name over the guy who had over 100 customers. Why? He was cuter.

Ashley (who turned out to be just as cute and charming in person) showed up and set to work: he was to clean my tiny, excessively messy kitchen, take out the trash, and measure and ferry two sets of curtains that needed to be hemmed to the dry cleaners, and also pick up a dress while he was there. He did all of these things in record time, with precision.

Ashley, who’d moved from Atlanta to Seattle sight unseen in September, had been doing odd jobs since he arrived, and had just started with TaskRabbit. Most of his bookings were cleanings (he’d just done a deep clean of a houseboat for a man who’d lived there 10 years) and personal assistance work, and his vet-tech background gave him an edge (that day he was also delivering a cat to and from an appointment).

“I’ve just always worked odd jobs throughout my life. My parents were always like, ‘Get good at one thing,’ but I always wanted to experience lots of things,” he said as he deftly cleaned my kitchen.

The one thing he’s not good at? Taking an online driver’s education course for someone who got a DUI — which is actually a job someone hired him to do via TaskRabbit. Ever the Southern gentleman, he politely declined.

Cost: $25 an hour, minus the $15 first-timer discount: $16.25, including service fee.

• 11:30 a.m., Postmates. I had been out of my particular eye makeup and makeup remover for a few weeks but the brand I get, Clinique, is only available in department stores downtown, and dealing with that holiday madness seems like a chore, so I’d been putting it off.

This, then, would be perfect for Postmates, a delivery service that can bring anything you need — whether it’s a MacBook Pro from the Apple store or a meal from your favorite restaurant — with a click of a button. Postmates promises to deliver within an hour (you’ll pay more for the busiest times), and offers you a real-time map view of where your Postmate delivery guy or gal (in this case, a tall, burly dude named Timothy) is. So I watched as he made his way from Portage Bay to Sephora, where he texted me if it was OK to buy the item even though it was $4 more. (Yes, it’s OK!)

He showed up a few minutes later clutching the dainty Sephora bag in his big hand, and the thought of him asking for Clinique chubby stick shadow tint for eyes in Bountiful Beige made me giggle.

Cost: $29.90 (the $6.75 delivery fee was waived), including a $4.78 tip and $2.07 service fee.

• 12:30 p.m., Drizly. The second the Drizly email was sent out it spread like wildfire throughout the office. Who doesn’t want alcohol delivered to their house? Visions of perfectly mixed cocktails danced in my head, so I was disappointed to learn that it’s just bottles of booze (and some mixers).

Still, booze on demand! While not offering real-time updates, they arrived promptly about midway through the expected hour.

Marques, the co-owner of Downtown Spirits, one of the local partners with Drizly, actually delivered the wine. He was very nice.

Cost: With a first-timer promo code that waived the $5 delivery fee, $27.41 later, I had two bottles, worth $12 and $11 each, in hand.

• 1:15 p.m., Zirx. While an on-demand personal valet service might not seem as necessary as it is in, say, Los Angeles, in parking-challenged South Lake Union, aka Amazon’s campus, paying $15 a day to someone who will park your car and fetch it at the end of the night for you seems like a bargain. (Especially when you consider that many of the lots’ daily rates are as much as $20 a day, and you might have to walk quite a ways.) At 1:05 p.m., I clicked on my Zirx app and dropped the pin in front of the Seattle Times building. Ten minutes later, Luke cheerily greeted me. He had sent me a “code” to confirm that he was really a Zirx valet, not some random guy wearing a vest there to steal my highly desirable car (a 1992 Honda Accord. Yeah, you’re jealous). At the end of the day, I again dropped my pin, and though there was a slight misunderstanding about the location, once that was cleared up, the driver was there in a jiffy. He even had a boxed water for me.

Cost: $15 a day; free with promotional discount.

• 1:30 p.m., Caviar. The first day I arrived in New York City, my friend Mario, a Seattle expat, sat me down on the couch, held up a fistful of delivery menus, and explained gently, “You will never have to cook again.” Fast-forward 15 years, and Seattle’s food delivery situation is still nowhere near as good as New York’s. But with several different food-delivery apps like Caviar, Postmates and Bitesquad, that’s changing.

One of my favorite dishes is Skillet restaurant’s fried chicken, a delicacy I no longer enjoy as frequently since I moved further away. Skillet does not deliver. But Caviar does. Laziness problem solved.

Skillet’s delicious kale Caesar salad with fried chicken was on its way to being in my belly, stat. At 1:17, I started getting notices from Caviar that they would be arriving. In mere minutes, I was greedily scarfing on it in front of my jealous co-workers, one of whom declared, “I need to start thinking of better story ideas.”

Cost: $16.58, with $4.99 delivery fee waived with promo code.

• 5:15 p.m., Munchery. As for dinner, that evening I had an appointment in the area at 6:45, and I didn’t have anything in the house to cook, but Munchery, an app that offers pre-made meals by local chefs, solved this first-world problem. (Think of it as having your own rotating cast of private chefs). The meals (I got a Roasted Fruit and Pork Fall Salad and a cheese plate) are well-made, healthy and cheaper than an entree in a restaurant (about $9.95 for most entrees; $4.95 to $6.95 for sides and apps). And, it was quite filling.

Cost: $10.79, after a $10 discount for a first-time promotion.

So, how easy was it, really? I spent an inordinate amount of time signing up, putting in credit card details, and figuring out what I wanted to order and when it could be delivered. I had to research the items for both Postmates and Drizly, which led down an Internet rabbit hole.

Timing everything was a bit stressful, too. Figuring out if the TaskRabbit could come between 10 a.m. and noon; discovering Munchery only delivered in the afternoon and I’d have to cart the food around for a few hours before getting to eat it.

In the end, I did manage to pack, and when I came home to eat my delicious pre-made meal, my kitchen was already clean and the trash was taken out. But if I had to do it all over, I would have hired Ashley the TaskRabbit to order the services for me. How neat, how modern, how very, very lazy.