keitha
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2024, hopefully the year I get out of P2P
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Post by keitha on Mar 22, 2024 22:19:27 GMT
my OH asked me to help a friend of hers sort out some IT issues.
She asked my OH what the going rate for IT technical support is, my OH spoke to her son and told the friend that £20 an hour is a fair rate for cash in hand mates rates, and she said that seemed fair
I drove a 60 mile round trip including picking up the OH
I spent 3 hours sorting issues, and used up one of my stock of external hard drives cases.
as we left she went to the kitchen and gave me a sealed envelope.
just got home and opened the envelope to find it contains 2 £5 notes, phoned my OH and she's spoken to the friend who said she thought £10 was fair for what I did, and that she had given us cake and a drink whilst we were there.
I've said to tell her I won't be doing anything else for her as I feel conned
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Mar 23, 2024 9:30:10 GMT
£20 an hour is a fair rate for cash in hand mates rates reasonable. Reminder: Minimum wage goes up to £11.44/hour next weekend. I'd have opened the envelope when I was handed it. "There appears to be a mistake - we agreed £20/hour, times three hours, plus £x for the drive case. I'm not charging you for the sixty mile round trip."What was your OH's reply to her friend? Have YOU spoken to your customer?
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keitha
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2024, hopefully the year I get out of P2P
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Post by keitha on Mar 23, 2024 9:45:32 GMT
I've spoken to her as I felt aggrieved this morning and asked my OH for her number ( cut out the middleman and have a direct conversation ) she says I was only working for about 30 minutes because a lot of the time "I wasn't doing anything" no that would be when stuff was downloading, installing, copying data from one machine to another.
Yes had I been in my previous work role I would have had 4-5 machines on the go at the same time. and yes I could have set it off downloading everything at once but I find 2 100Mb downloads run together take longer than 2 run 1 after the other.
ironically I was told before we went over not to discuss politics as she's quite left wing, but obviously capitalist that thinks if I'm not physically typing on screen it's not part of the job
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Mar 23, 2024 9:46:53 GMT
Ah, the perennial difficulty of whether sitting there watching a download tick away is chargeable or not.
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eeyore
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Post by eeyore on Mar 23, 2024 11:48:48 GMT
I've spoken to her as I felt aggrieved this morning and asked my OH for her number ( cut out the middleman and have a direct conversation ) she says I was only working for about 30 minutes because a lot of the time "I wasn't doing anything". no that would be when stuff was downloading, installing, copying data from one machine to another. ...... The rule I always used, based on the policy when, over forty years ago, I joined the in-house consultancy of a large multinational providing consultancy services to the subsidiaries, was simply " time on site" and rounded up to whole days (plus one day per page of the report to the client). After retirement, I joined a volunteer-based national advice/support charity and I ran the IT for my local office - when I provided chargeable support to other offices, I adopted the same policy but rounding to the nearest half-day. Yes, I did do "house-calls" to my volunteer colleagues to sort out their domestic IT problems but I would never dream of charging them. Having been through the training and done a few months of supervised advice-giving, I quickly realised that running the IT operations, expanding the workstations from three to thirty on a miniscule budget, building and supporting a software system that other offices also wanted and being on-call for 6-days per week for more than ten years was much preferable to the stress levels my colleagues endured even if they were only on two days per week.
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iRobot
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Post by iRobot on Mar 23, 2024 12:21:31 GMT
Situation like this remind me of the Steinmetz anecdote where, in the late 19th century, he is said to have charged Henry Ford $10,000 to put a chalk mark on a faulty generator, instructing the engineers on what to do and then left them to it. Somewhat taken aback by the fee - about £300,000 in today's money - Ford apparently requested an itemised bill, which he received, as follows: Perceived knowledge-value can be depressingly low with the 'client' measuring a trade-person's worth based against how they themselves get rewarded to undertake their own role; " well I only get paid £xx per hour to do my job and (s)he's just sitting their watching a counter move slowly across the screen". |
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on Mar 23, 2024 12:28:26 GMT
I've spoken to her as I felt aggrieved this morning and asked my OH for her number ( cut out the middleman and have a direct conversation ) she says I was only working for about 30 minutes because a lot of the time "I wasn't doing anything". no that would be when stuff was downloading, installing, copying data from one machine to another. ...... The rule I always used, based on the policy when, over forty years ago, I joined the in-house consultancy of a large multinational providing consultancy services to the subsidiaries, was simply " time on site" and rounded up to whole days (plus one day per page of the report to the client). After retirement, I joined a volunteer-based national advice/support charity and I ran the IT for my local office - when I provided chargeable support to other offices, I adopted the same policy but rounding to the nearest half-day. Yes, I did do "house-calls" to my volunteer colleagues to sort out their domestic IT problems but I would never dream of charging them. Having been through the training and done a few months of supervised advice-giving, I quickly realised that running the IT operations, expanding the workstations from three to thirty on a miniscule budget, building and supporting a software system that other offices also wanted and being on-call for 6-days per week for more than ten years was much preferable to the stress levels my colleagues endured even if they were only on two days per week. My father in law was a carpenter, actually a hard wood joiner which is a bit of a level up. He used to do work for friends and neighbours and they would give him a packet of cigarettes or enough for a pint and think they had paid him so felt it was OK to keep asking him to do more work for them. He started refusing the 'gifts' just to get them off his back. He did fantastic work btw.
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eeyore
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Post by eeyore on Mar 23, 2024 13:54:12 GMT
Situation like this remind me of the Steinmetz anecdote where, in the late 19th century, he is said to have charged Henry Ford $10,000 to put a chalk mark on a faulty generator, instructing the engineers on what to do and then left them to it. Somewhat taken aback by the fee - about £300,000 in today's money - Ford apparently requested an itemised bill, which he received, as follows: And that reminds me of the occasions when I'd fix a computer within minutes when colleagues had spent fruitless hours trying themselves and wanting to know how I'd done it so quickly, I'd respond " because I know the swear words that this model of computer responds to, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you what they are".
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Mar 23, 2024 14:15:22 GMT
🤣
SWMBO’s request and wanted to get paid? 🤔
probably not monetarily rewarding
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ethel
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Post by ethel on Mar 23, 2024 18:03:39 GMT
I think this is typical of doing favours for friends, or friends of friends. They think you're going to do what is often a highly skilled job for the price of a piint or something similar. And then when you refuse they think you're a miserable/tight old bastard. You can't win.
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keitha
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2024, hopefully the year I get out of P2P
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Post by keitha on Jul 11, 2024 10:15:07 GMT
LOL just had a phone call - Landline I didn't recognise
"hello you don't know me, but I'm a friend of X"
"who"
"X, you did some work on her laptop earlier this year"
"oh right I remember now"
"well she says you did a really good job, and a very reasonable price, I have some issues and was hoping you could come and fix it"
we then had a short discussion on the issues and I asked where she lived, having ascertained we were talking about a 60 mile round trip I told her that I would charge £35 to go look at it and the first hour and £15 per hour after that
"£50 for 2 hours then, that's more than I earn at the university"
"It's not really 2 hours It will take me 3/4 of an hour to drive each way so for £50 you would get 3 and a half hours of my time"
"how about £30 fixed price as long as it takes"
"sorry but I'm not interested at that price, goodbye"
60 mile round trip is £7 just in fuel.
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Jul 11, 2024 10:40:30 GMT
Ask her to join gofundme, and see how much she could raise. 🤣
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