I get this call at 10:00 tonight from a friend of mine. He used to work for the same company I did, but has since moved 2000 miles away. While he was working for this company, he did work for this guy that owns a boat parts shop. You know, like rope, sails, oars, that kind of stuff. This guy has 1 server running linux and 6 client machines that connect to it for his POS stuff. He's running RAID5 with 2 data drives, one parity drive, and 1 hot-swap spare. Some time this evening, the system goes down. All his data went with it as the backup hadn't run yet.

OK. I get a call from my friend in Jersey asking if I could go see this guy at 10:45 at his shop to see if there's anything I can do to bring his data, or better yet, his server, back from the dead. No problem, I say, even though I'm already ready for bed. I throw on some clothes, jump in the car and start the 30-45 minute drive. The only thing that irritates me is that the ENTIRE problem is that his chip fan has frozen solid, turning the heat sink into an insulater rather than a conducter. So basically I spent an hour and fifteen minutes driving all the way across town and back to look at his fan and say "I think I know what your problem is." Now tomorrow I have to go get a fan and drive back to his shop to spend all of 1.5 minutes clipping it in. Total actual work: 6.5 minutes. Plus 2.5 hours driving time. Now, I normally charge $75 or so for general support. I figure for this guy, $100 is more than enough to cover my trouble. I mean, I hate to charge him at all. But I have to. I guess. I mean, if I charge him for 2 hours, that's $100. Which by rights I shouldn't feel bad about, especially since it was an emergency call at 10PM. I mean, a plumber isn't going to cut ME a break if I call him out after hours and my problem is just that one bolts isn't tight enough. I just feel like an ass charging $100 for 6.5 minutes of work, 5 minutes of which was taking his case cover off. Add to all this that it's a 71 year old guy that's just as nice as anyone I've ever met.

Then again, if I don't charge him, I'd really hate to have to drive out there every time a mouse stops responding. Does any of this make sense? I guess it all boils down to the fact that I don't want to charge this grandpa $100 to point at his fan and say "replace that". Oh well. I guess I can't always be the nice guy. Business is business, right? I really think it would bother me less if I needed the money. But I was doing this as a favor to my friend, more than anything. Pbbbbbbt. I guess this is why I'll never be rich.