Replies

I am reminded of the old anecdote told by some famous motivational speaker. It speaks to the notion of how elitists frequently look down upon laborers, but are nonetheless captive to them, because of their own stupidity. It went something like this:

I woke up Sunday morning to find a puddle on my kitchen floor by the sink. There was water leaking from under my sink. After calling a number of plumbers who said they could not respond on a Sunday, I finally got a guy who would come out. He said it would be $100 for him to show up and $25 for every half-hour thereafter. Desperate, I agreed.

He showed up soon enough, looked under the sink, applied a wrench to a valve nut, tightened it 3/4 of a turn, closed up his bag and said that would be $125.

Flabbergasted, I yelled at him, “you’re telling me that for you to come out here and turn a nut 3/4 of a turn, it’s gonna’ cost me $125!?”

“That’s right, sir,” he replied.

“Why, I’m a world renowned motivational speaker,” I told him, “and even I don’t get paid $125 for 15 seconds of work!”

“Well,” said the plumber, “when I was a world-renowned motivational speaker, I didn’t get paid that either. So that’s why I’m a plumber. $125, sir”

That is very funny. I actually had A/C issues a few weeks ago. I could tell the capacitor wasn't jumping the compressor off so I took off the capacitor, took it to the local supplier and got a new one. When my A/C still wouldn't work rigth I called the A/C guy. He came out and told me I had the wrong capacitor, the supply shop must have given me one that was too small.

i told him just to charge me the normal price and fix it.

A 21 dollar capacitor cost me 110 bucks plus service call and tax. The bill came to over 200.

What things cost are generally what it's worth to ya.

“Well,” said the plumber, “when I was a world-renowned motivational speaker, I didn’t get paid that either. So that’s why I’m a plumber. $125, sir”

About 6 years ago I was working as a systems engineer and network troubleshooter, and my company billed me at $150/hr. We got an emergency call from this company, and the pain in the a$$ boss was just constantly hovering over me. Anyway, the problem they were having was due to a cabling problem (they had their telecom guys do some network premises cabling for them, and they wired the jacks wrong. I got together with their lead telecom guy and showed him how to rewire the jacks, and told the boss that the problem was going to be easy for their telecom guys to fix, and since they were paying them anyway, they could do it without having to pay me for the 3 to 4 hours it was going to take. He agreed, but when I presented him the bill for $150 for the 30 minutes I was there, he looked at the bill, got all angry, and stated "I don't even pay my lawyer $150/hr!" So I replied, "OK, so next time you've got a network problem that takes your server room down, call your lawyer to fix it!"

Mark