Cliff quoted a price to do the job, in this case it took him only 15 minutes, however it could have taken a couple of hours, what would the client have done when he asked for double the fee,

This is the basic difference between a t&m (time and materials) or a fixed rate job.

It is amazing how many people agree to one and then when they see what transpires suddenly want to backtrack and change the deal.

What people need to remember in situations like this is that they are not just paying you for what you do, they are paying you for using your knowledge to work out what needs to be done to fix the issue.

I'd have taken the guys money and then told him to never contact me for help again in the future for being such a dick.

If this was just a business client, then yes. But when even the bereaved relative of a friend is viewed as an opportunity for profit?

Yes, I know that 'time is money', but who else would really have even thought about charging for this?

Wow, 2 downvotes already, what have we become? Are times really that hard? If altruism must come second to profit, even the big bad companies that we all love to hate on here understand the financial value of goodwill.

Cliff had to buy a USB->SATA adapter, the money would cover that and a pint.

Agree that charging at cost might have been reasonable - personally in this case for the sake of £6 I'd have been inclined to think 'well, at least I've now got a USB->SATA adapter that will probably come in useful someday'. And maybe just hoped that friend would have done the decent thing and bought me a pint next time we were out together.

I'm with you... the amount of people i help on the basis that some day I might need their help , its better to have one or two favours already in the bank. plus if it wasn't for people giving time willingly would i have a nice shiny Linux OS to use ? There is more in life than money..

You're not just paying for the time spent on-site however. There's the travel to/from the site, the cost of the fuel, the time spent on the original phone call. Depending how far he had to drive, suddenly this balloons Cliff's total time up to an hour or two.

Bear all this in mind and £50 sounds quite reasonable to me.

As an IT consultant, I implemented a four hour minimum for on-site visits in (roughly) 1990, a couple years after I went solo. Double on weekends/holidays. A few clients balked at the new rate ... I simply told 'em "Don't call me unless you actually need me". Or, as I tell prospective new clients "It's my job to ensure we see as little of each other as possible".

A new issue arose. Convincing 'em to pay 4 hours for a one minute visit. The old TV repairman's maxim applied, "I'm not charging you for thumping your telly with a screwdriver. I'm charging you for knowing where and how hard to thump your telly, and for showing up to do it". The explanation seems to have worked ... although about four years ago a child CEO wondered why I'd need to thump a telly with a screwdriver.

Telephony guy turned electrician I get this alot.

1) well YouTube said..

2) but all you did was reset the RCD after unplugging the kettle. (I did ask you to do this on the phone before coming out)

3) Mr I know 'bout lectrics it must be something other than plugging the multiple 4 way blocks into themselves. (Regular Christmas lights problem)

4) Why £60 to connect my cooker? It's only 5 minutes work and Dave down the pub will do it for £20 [1]

The joys. Aaargghhhhh

Pint day all....

Dave

PS:. First! (Nearly)

[1] yeah but is he going to continuity, IR and Zs test it?

...Dave down the pub will do it for £20

Well then, why didn't you contact Dave instead? If he can do it, why call me? But you called me and now you have to pay me . Next time you may call Dave instead of complaining to me.

Dave does it for £20 but charges £50 extra for the moaning.

Had that far too often in a variety of situations.

Then, of course, when they do get Dave to do the job, and it fails, they expect you to come and fix it.

Many years ago, at the dawn of the PC era, I worked for a small software house that also supplied computers (mainly Apricot - it was a long time ago). We had a customer ask for a quote for a new PC for home, which we provided. Next thing, "Oh, I've bought this PC from Dixons, will you come and set it up?" Like many small dealers at that time we couldn't buy the kit wholesale for what Dixons, et al, were selling it for, and customers weren't prepared to pay a premium for personal service.

My little independant computer shop used to have a board outside thst said "queue here for free support for PCs brought at Dixons/Currys/Calculus". Whats frightening was the amouint of people who did. Whats even more frightening was the fact they thought they offered such a service.

I was in the shop once when someone had brought back a faulty PC they had brought in Box Shifter PLC and expected them to replace it FOC because Box Shifter PLC didnt want to know and the abuse given when he was told to take it back to them. I remember saying "Well thats what you get when you go there"

The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue. The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant.

Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up. Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again.

The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000. Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay. Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price. Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill. Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies.

The new, itemized bill reads….

Hammer: $5

Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995

I heard it thus:

Giving telly a thump, 6d ... Knowing where to thump it, 19/6 ... knowing how hard, "That'll be a guinea, guv."

The rest is for the service call.

I'm a bloody Yank ... and that was Grandad's joke, told in a Yorkshire accent!

I always heard it from the point of view of a car body repair shop guy fixing a dent with one tap, but the point is still the same

Just don't get Ted Crilly to tap out the dent.

"Oh, I'll just give it another little tap to get it back the other way. Oh that's too far, I'll give it another tap again, it'll definitely be right this time."

Downvote me all ye who have not done something like this.

That'l be £250 before I start squire...

And would that money just be resting in your bank account?

No. I wouldn't even get out of bed for that little.

Good for you, I guess?

For an early-20s IT tech, this level of fix would both be within their capabilities and would likely be quite a windfall. Early on in my career, I've done site visits and fixes for £20. Needs must, I suppose.

I once got the nice end of the stick... I quoted €40 for the job, they were so happy to have "My Pictures" folder back(I didn't ask what was in it!), they paid me €50 instead, also helped that I didn't have a tenner for change!

I did have my share of skinflints when doing side jobs. Most of them I never helped again, a few got my $pecial rate after that!!

In a previous employment, back in 2003, engineer call-outs were charged at £75 an hour with a minimum half-hour charge. One client called us out so much, for minor things, their minimum was bumped up to a full hour - and they happily paid...

I got someone in to do a couple of quick jobs, jobs that I could easily have done myself and they knew I could do them because several years earlier I was the one that taught them how to do it.

Once the jobs were finished and paid for we were having a chat and he asked why I got him to do the work, after all I could have done it myself and saved a few hundred pounds, I had to explain to him that in the same time he was doing the jobs I was working on something else that gave me the money to pay him and a few hundred on top. If I had done the job myself it would have cost me money, having him do the job meant that we both took a profit for the time.

agree, but all very good if you have enough work in the pipeline.

Otherwise you could have doth sequentially.

Client phones up. Can't get online. I tell them to restart the router. She is literally too scared to pull out the plug "in case the phone breaks". 25mins of call trying to get her to do this, I give up. Tell her that she has to pay the full hour if I come out.

So 30mins drive, to pull out a power cable on a router. £60 please.

To be fair, I did sit and give her an hour sorting out other mess on the computer for her.

Which reminds me of another one. Years back. Another 30mins drive, this time to turn off a PC that had got stuck during shut down. That guy was too embarrassed for me to stay longer than the five mins it took to power off the PC and pay me.

Often 5mins of knowledge is worth the fee if it saves the client time. It is the odd side of experience. The number of calls I get that I can now fix in five mins due to the 40 years of experience that tells me "I know this, I don't it before". The client pays for a solution.

The fee is broken down into: time spent: £20 ; years of experience such that I know how to do it: £30

Once, I was handed over a laptop HD, which contained a now deceased dog pictures that were dear to the owner.

He apparently earnt a number of prizes ... HD was fubared.

I attached it to my gaming system, booted windows but it flatly refused to read anything on it, there was some very worrying clicks, hinting at the head touching the surface or the head being a bit loose. Bad.

Booted SteamOS instead, and managed to mount the drive. Took me a full afternoon to cp -r all readable data to an USB key, and acknowledge all kernel warnings.

In the end, I probably recovered 25% of the pictures.

I won a full 2 dozens of Duvel beer bottles ! Nice !

If there's a next time, mounting the drive isn't the best idea. Better to dd it and work solely on the copy. If the copy mounts, great; but the most reliable method of extracting photos is to scan it for JPEG headers, because usually the file will be on contiguous blocks.

He was paying for the knowledge. Other times you might be paying for the presence of equipment, like if the fiber line to your house gets broken you might be able to fix it yourself if you had a splicer, but you'll pay someone $80 to come by for five minutes to do it because it isn't worth buying a splicer that you'd probably never use again.

The only time you are paying for time is if there is no special knowledge required and no special equipment. Then whether it is worth it to you comes down to how much you're willing to pay to NOT do the task, i.e. paying someone to clean your gutters or paint your garage.

The secretary had it right. The cost was a lot less than the alternative. What's more, when he agreed the price he did so because the result was worth at least what he was being asked.

The friend was overjoyed. And then queried the value. After all, £50 for 15 minutes of IT wizardry? That worked out at £200 ($261) per hour. A ridiculous sum of money, right?

Well obviously its not as much as this data protection company was going charge (rip off) the client. That would have been £4000 per hour.

I'm guessing the conversation went

"Hi , Disk salvagers here?"

"Could you get my precious files from my brothers laptop"

"Yes we think so , is the disk damaged?"

"no the machine just has a bios password"

"ok , we should be able to do it for , ooh , er , lets say £1000 , just bring it in."

"Hey boss , got another sucker on the hook - disk not even damaged or encrypted"

In fairness, for every job that really is that easy I'm sure that they get jobs where that are complications. If they are going to provide a price up front, the easy jobs are also paying some of the cost of the unexpectedly hard ones.

How many times have you been called out to a laptop which suddenly stopped working to find obvious;y new cracks or grazes on the case and been told no its not been dropped!

... let people know how long you actually need for the job.

This only destroys the magic.

I kind of had the opposite. I was visiting a friend, and he mentioned that his landlady had a problem with her computer and asked if I could I help. Her CDROM wasn't working. So I said 'sure' - I am an IT bod and I do this stuff all the time.

So his landlady showed me the computer. She'd already paid some IT shop to look and got nowhere. I pulled the case off only to see the damned thing wasn't even plugged in! I plugged it in, reassembled the case and tested the drive out with no problems. His landlady asked me how much I charged and I said 'nothing - you were screwed over by the IT shop and I just plugged in a cable". She insisted, and I got the easiest £50 ever for plugging in a cable. I never even mentioned a price - that was what she gave me.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz said much the same to Henry Ford to explain his $10000 invoice after he'd fixed a vexing problem in a generator that kept failing at one of Ford's new plants

https://history.stackexchange.com/a/43441

Wit endures :)

My Father was a photographer and loathed doing weddings. One of the things he always did when doing a wedding was to stamp proof all over the initial set of prints (25 years ago CMOS was a glint in someone's eye or only on Voyager). They always created about this and said that cousin 'Dave' would do it for £50.

I am known as the street geek on our road and regularly get asked questions about spinning up Wordpress sites even though I am a systems admin and not good at design. I haven't the heart to charge them an hour's consultancy to say I don't know anything about that but can spin up an AWS instance for them but they will have to design and maintain the site.