I lost a freelance job this morning because the client wasn't willing to pay my travel rate. I was going to have to travel 32 minutes each way, and wanted to cover time and gas, but I gave him the 30 minutes or less price for travel. The odd part was that he just blew up instead of asking if it was negotiable. Basically what he said rather angrily into the phone was [You're gonna charge me $xx.xx just to come out? I'll find someone else.] followed by a click. This from the guy I was trying to help out because the IT group he called told him he would have to buy a server and all this setup and config (and eventually support) service just to install a program that could be run on his existing desktop computer as a local server and be served to the other computer from there. I was probably only going to be there for an hour anyways and would have saved him about a thousand dollars at least.
I enjoy helping out small business owners that can't afford full time IT staff, but some times I feel like a cat scratching at anything within reach to land on the floor right-side-up after some of the things these people do.
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