Today I went to help a family member as his computer was running slow and I agreed to take a look at it as he figured that he needed to spend money to upgrade it but wasn’t sure how much it would cost. Upon looking at it, I concluded that he didn’t need to spend any money as it just looked like he simply had too many applications that automatically loaded up in the beginning. I simply disabled them while doing some tweaks and sure enough the computer ran a lot faster.
This isn’t something I do professionally in a business sense, but afterwards he wanted to pay me for my time as he mentioned he would have had to pay someone to do it anyways. He is actually a business oriented person as well and so to him it just felt really wrong to not compensate someone for their time.
On the other hand, I thought that the issue was so ridiculously easy since I was knowledgeable about it and on top of that I didn’t want to charge a family member for something so simple. We ended up going back and fourth about the topic in a nice way and eventually he mentioned that he still wants to pay me back in some other way.
It just feels too weird for me to take money for these small things that feel more like a casual gander especially when it is not in a demanding business fashion. For example, if it is a situation where the person starts setting a time and place where something must be done with certain guidelines then of course you should charge the person as you can’t survive by doing things like that for free all the time.
Of course there are always those that try and abuse other’s generosities, but that is usually spotted fairly quickly.
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