If you serve some sort of specialist function in your job or your general capability, chances are that you have had some idiot ask you (or beg you) to do “this tiny little thing” for them.

“Hey man, you are good at this, so can you fix this thing for me? It just stopped working, but since you’re so smart at this stuff, I’m sure you can fix it in just fifteen minutes!”.

In retrospect, in 20 years of being a “computer geek”, I’ve had this served to me far too often, and far too often have I had the misplaced generosity of agreeing to take on the task. I’ve been raised too well.

Almost always do these incessant “tiny jobs” turn out to be something that take at the VERY least twice the time you’d think it would – or the idiot that handed it to you thought it would. In one case I had a task take me ten times the expected time frame, though I’d concede that it was due to my own stupid perfectionism, spending unreasonably much time to hunt down and fix a problem which should really just have a sticky-label smacked on it which read “this thing is fucked. toss it, buy something new”.

What the real lesson here isn’t that the “tiny jobs” usually turn out not to be tiny.

The lesson is that the assholes that hand them to you are either deeply ignorant as to how much time it takes to collect data, diagnose, get the right tools for the job or bug-tracking and start fixing, actually fixing (requires other tools, and likely spare parts), slapping it back together, testing that the shit works, then retesting, and then getting it back to the person in question. This is not counting the time and mental effort it takes to do the mental logistics of all of these, from A to Z.

Aside from their ignorance would be what is even worse: The likely case they simply don’t care about your time spent, more astutely, the time you spent accumulating the knowledge that is intimately linked with your ability to perform the work demanded of you.

You see, there is this economic fact about people that they are willing to pay somewhat in proportion to their own assessed importance of what they want.

There is the more important fact that people tend to haggle the price, just for the sake of haggling, which is why nobody ever says that you’re asking too low a price when you say that you’d like 20$/hour for the work you performed. “OMG; only twenty bucks?? You did so well, this is so important to me, here, have forty!” Yeah, right.

Even if you do decent work for this miserably low wage, your skills taken into consideration, you will still sit with the turd in your lap if the thing you did work on end up failing for whatever reason. It could be the gizmo you fixed, switched with a spare, or it could be a thingamajig somewhere else in the thing that died on them. The assholes that asked you for a poorly-compensated favour will end up pointing the finger at you 90% of the time, though usually diplomatically, as it tends to work better most of the time amongst people that have high moral standards and/or high standards as far as their professional integrity goes.

Some of the time they may be right (and you will have screwed something up, in which case you are naturally obliged to fix the mess, and they not do it again), but often not. But you still have that cross to bear.

So, you end up with more work, which just might just end up in the same merry-go-round as before, in which case you start look thoroughly incompetent at your job. You will start feeling like either like and incompetent, or an asshole, or both. Bear that cross, you incompetent! You should have done your job properly the first time! (Don’t mention the bathtub curve. Most people don’t understand the statistics, and the odd fact that dispirited items tend to behave in perverse ways compared to their expected function, which is a law unto itself).

If it does turn out to work well, not only will the reward usually be minuscule compared to their convenience of dropping it on you, they will usually just forget about your effort, because the price you asked was inconsequential to them. Do you remember every grab after pocket change you tossed out for trifles? No, you don’t.

Point of this whole open wound of doing “favor work” for others as a professional, is that not only are you underpaid, but you are also under undue moral pressure for your work, often for reasons out of your control, if you did your work well.

You know why professionals charge so much for their services, such as on-location consultants and “fixers” from one of the big brand manufacturers?

It is because that if the thing that needs fixing is important enough, people will pay their asking price. If it is not, they won’t. Their decision shows their real intent. Second and of greater gravitas, it is because people are assholes. They are ignorant as to the cost in your time; worse is that if they are less ignorant, they are assholes that don’t care!

Worser still (adjective maculation for emphasis), the cheaper you set your price, the more they will not only make you dance around if something goes wrong, the more they will subliminally despise you. Why shouldn’t they? You’ve shown your worth to them with your too-low price – their resentment is costless to them. You are their willing favor-monkey.

Your time is time taken out of your free time, that precious substance we call our spare time, the thing that is increasingly squeezed between your 37-40-45-50 hour work-week (commuting not included), the necessity for sleep and other bodily functions, family life, and the time you need as a human being to socialise with your friends and acquaintances. Time done on favours for assholes that don’t appreciate your effort is time down the drain.

They may be assholes in asking you for work for pittances, but they are not the idiots if you agree to their crumbs. You are.

Litmus test: If someone asks you to “hey can you fix this!”, sling out this: “Sure I can! Just give me a thousand [dollars/euroes]!”. Gauge the resulting reaction. Take notes.