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Best Results From Bartering Computer Services?
silicon not in the v writes "Last night I was over at some friends' house. They had cable modem with no firewall and tons of spyware, etc. on their system. They complained about all the popups and how bad it was that they were afraid to let their kids on the computer, so I set them up with ZoneAlarm, Ad Aware, and Firefox to get it cleaned up. In return, the husband, who is a chiropractor, gave my wife and I a free adjustment. What other interesting services or benefits have people been able to get by bartering IT/programming services?"
I will fix your computer in return for one of these.
What other interesting services or benefits have people been able to get by bartering IT/programming services?
Beer. And lots of it.
--saint
Isn't this the story line for some cheap porno film??
I do some work for an ISP, and I get a couple of servers hosted for free, including bandwidth.
I also have a nice thing going where I host his users (on my servers), and he sends people needing web design to me.
It works out nicely.
I get my taxes done for free after setting up a Samba domain for a local accountant here in my area. Pretty nice if you ask me.
Well my comp sci teacher lied to me. Apparently, you can't barter computer skills for sex. Bastard!
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
About all I've ever managed to get for helping my friends with their computer troubles is their recommendation to their friends to bug me to help them. A losing proposition all around.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
When I was a student, I set up an old 8086 "XT" class machine with DOS and 8-in-1 office software for a small restaurant. Basically just duplicated their ledger in the spreadsheet. I ate breakfast there all summer for free.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
My favorite thus far was an offer from a couple in Ireland who offered a night's lodging and a hearty Irish breakfast should we ever visit their fair country--in exchange for the bonus level pack.
Even though we probably won't hav ethe opportunity to take them up on the offer anytime soon, it was made in earnest, and I was happy to send them a copy of the level pack in return. Even though I can't buy beer 'n' pizza with it, this "barter" has proven far more memorable than the typical few bucks plonked in the PayPal account...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Better watch out for the IRS. You have to claim barter on your taxes!
...I have this friend who is a proctologist and he was having computer problems and...
This way to the egress...
"I'm here to fix the comptuer."
"It's in the bedroom."
"This is going to be a long, hard job."
"Maybe my roommate can help."
I fixed computers for hundreds of women. I think one of them later smiled at me. Sure she was nailing my jock roomate, but I still think I came close to losing my virginity...
maybe if you gave them linux you could've gotten the "happy ending"
You could just name this story "I am a geek and married".
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
I had plastic surgery to my face (the removal of six ugly moles) in return for doing some SEO (nothing unethical, just getting the right search terms in the right places) to the surgeons homepage that brought it into the first place on most search engines when one searched for "breast enlargement" (in the local language).
I think that beats your bone bending...
I have this neighbor who works at the NSA. He isn't really the bartering type. He, instead, prefers ominous threats.
Anyway, one day he walked over to my house, knocked on the door, and demanded that I help him get all the crap off his computer. Since he's never too nice to me, I asked him why I should do this. He said if I didn't he'd make me an NSA test case for subdermal tracking devices. Empty threat, I thought to myself.
Well, I was wrong. Now I have the black vans that seem to track me at a distance. They do a good job of staying out of sight, but I know they are following me. I guess I'm comforted by the fact that someone, somewhere knows my neighbors IP and what web sites he visits.
In return for my services in fixing friends and family's PCs and printers I have recieved:
Beer
Free labor on replacement of my water heater.
Free server hosting
A kitchen faucet (a nice lifetime warranty Moen one, but not the kitchen sink to go with it)
Discounted closing on my home mortgage
Supper
More Beer
Lots more food, including gift certificates to nice restaurants
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
I fixed up my pastor's PC, and in return he has saved my eternal soul. :)
Yep you heard me.
Actually, I was going to get the sex anyways, the small perl script was just what I did to prolong the sex.
anyone wearing that shirt rightly deserves the social ostracization that will ensue.
Photos.
[woman in nightie]: ...but I don't have a hard drive...
*bow chica bow bow*
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
I did some REAL minor graphic work (changing 3 buttons for their website) for a firm a few months back... one of the provisions of my day job's contract is that I'm forbidden from doing any outside work, so I asked my boss if I could do a little one-off on the side as long as no money changed hands, and he agreed... so I got the side folks to give me a new bowling ball instead of cash - everyone happy all around!
By the way, the new ball added almost 30 pins to my average right out of the gate. If you can lay your hands on an original Spirit, they're awesome!
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
[ex girlfriend] I'm having problems with my PC, I keep getting popups and it freezes all the time.
[me] That stinks...
[ex girlfriend] Would you come over and fix it for me?
[me] I'm kinda busy lately...
[ex girlfriend] I'll make it worth the trip
[me] Leaving now!!!
...and it was really gwood, too!
Last night I had some geek come over to my house who wanted to install some crap on my computer. I let him, and in return I got to fondel his wife. I called it "adjusting".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Homeopathy is not medical science, and it's not accepted in Europe, not among real scientists and doctors anyway. Please don't lie.
A month or so before I moved into my first apartment she was moving out of her one-bedroom to live with her new fiance, and so in return for my work she called me up and gave me all the furniture from her old apartment provided I move it out.
I ended up getting a futon, couch, kitchen table and chairs, two clothes chests, a couple end tables, and a slew of kitchen stuff (plates, glasses, pots etc), all in excellent condition. She essentially totally furnished my new place and it cost me nothing.
I consider this to be the best example of good karma at work I've experienced to date.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
cookies, and... My Little Pony stickers...
Dear Penthouse Letters,
....
I never thought I'd be writing to you, but
Get off my lawn.
It was supposed to be about love, but in the end it wasn't. C'est la vie.
At least she didn't give you a virus.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I think he means free as in speech.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
So I guess he bartered christian services for MS Office development and support services.
A sad state of affairs when a minister barters with the devil...
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
No kidding, a year or so back my mother's boyfriend asked me if I could come over to one of his friends house to fix a problem he was having with his computer. It was about 8 or 9 on a Sunday evening , my only day off I might add, but I said "sure". After hearing a description of the problem I determined it was Blaster so I loaded up my trusty pen drive with the removal tool and Ad-aware. After spending 45 minutes removing blaster, patching, removing around 300 bits of spyware (according to Ad-aware),and defragmenting I figured the guy was going to hand me a twenty or possibly even a fifty (he owned a used car dealership) for doing all that work and making it to where his computer was usable again. What was my grand reward for taking over an hour and a half (this includes driving time) of my time on a Sunday night? A yummy bottle of Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink. The sad part is that if I had killed him I would be considered the criminal.....
was this a girls dorm for college or a middle school?
In college, I was approached by one of my girlfriend's dormmates, a good-looking blonde poli-sci major who'd procrastinated on some statistical thing she needed to do on the campus computer system. She was in danger of failing a class if she didn't get it done over the weekend, and she literally didn't even know how to log into the system.
So, after much hinting and many awkward silences, she blurted out that she'd do anything I wanted if I bailed her out. Surely at that moment I achieved a permanent place in the Geek Hall of Fame, perhaps in the Absurd Fantasies wing.
But it gets better. You see, I was very happy with my girlfriend at the time (whom I later married), and I didn't want to mess that up by sleeping with someone she saw every day and whom I didn't trust to keep quiet. So I turned her down.
For the sex, anyway. I had her take me out to dinner instead. The stats thing she needed took me 20 minutes to run.
I was walking on air for some time after that, just based on the principle of the thing.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Trucks now a days are very high tech. They almost all have GPS responders that reveal where they are, what speed they are doing etc. And truckers are lonely, so they often have internet connections for use while they are parked for the night.
I have found many truckers to be computer geeks at heart.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
When I was going to college, I was working weekends in NY and going to school in Baltimore, and, well, I had a little accident on the New Jersey Turnpike where I sort of hit a Highway Patrol car in the snow at very low speed. He wrote me up a ticket for "careless driving," which would have sent my insurance through the roof.
I was embarrassed about it, but I mentioned it to my although-I-didn't-know-it-wife-to-be, and felt that I had to plead guilty to the charge. She mentioned that her uncle was a lawyer in New Jersey, and that he was having trouble configuring his new Unix box (a Fortune computer, this was 1983.) A deal was quickly struck.
I went up there for the weekend, and got his machine configured, and he told me about this spectacular precedent called the Wenzel case in New Jersey -- where no matter what the evidence is, if the cop didn't actually see you being careless he couldn't charge you with that. He refused to represent me, but he counseled me with exactly what I had to say. Basically, although I was acting in my own defense, I couldn't testify for myself -- I would merely cite the case.
Well, traffic court in New Jersey was a long slow process, and I was the last one there when the cop finally deigned to appear. He gave his report, and I offered no explanation, but cited Wenzel, and the judge said "Get out of here." And so I did.
That barter probably saved me many thousands of dollars over the next few years.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Actually there are plent of country boy geeks. When I went to Rose-Hulman a bunch of us geeks would head out to go shooting. We looked like typical rednecks. That is where we coined the phrase "high-tech redneck".
A nosy friend of my mother's fixed me up and introduction to a young lady. At the time I lived in Atlanta and she lived in Lafayette, Louisiana. We were both in school. We emailed each other and made a phone call or two for three months before she came to Atlanta to visit her mother.
Now I do Windows, but at heart I'm a Mac guy. As soon as I introduced myself to this lady, I determined that she was a Mac user. She told me that her mother was a self-employed person who ran her business out of her home on a Macintosh, and that her mother needed a great deal of computer help, which she wasn't really able to pay for.
(Lightbulb goes off).
We met. Five months later she bailed out of grad school and moved to Atlanta. We were inseparable. And I spent a lot of time, gratis, helping her mother tackle her Mac problems and get her business and office under control. I upgraded both of them to newer Macs, largely at my own expense.
When I asked the young lady to marry me, and she said "Yes," I went to her mother.
I said, "Linda, how would you like a lifetime of free technical support?"
(Wedding bells)
I used to fix computers for friends for free just as a favour.. Then word travelled locally and I built a good reputation. People started offering me all sorts of things for computer help; free wine, beer, wine and beermaking accessories (all while I was underage), free weights (yeah, like I actually work out), cookies, dates with hot women (I never did and never will take a pity date), and eventually I became good enough at doing it that most of my offers were money. And so I registered a computer consulting business at age 16.
I soon had people asking if I could build computers for them.. or tell them what to buy.. or better yet, if they could just hand me the money and I'd do it all for them. I mostly do it for money these days, but I regularly get tips because customers are happy with my level of honesty. Most of my tips are cash (about 10% tip on a whole computer, which is pretty big.. especially considering most parts only have 13% markup!) but I am still tipped with a couple cases of beer now and then. I've had customers ask if they could set me up with their daughters, I can get into a number of local clubs for free with no line, a few local gyms, and I get discount pricing on pretty much everything I buy.
Computer skills can get you seriously networked with people. I think that's the most important part of all. My friends are always shocked at how many people I know. We'll be talking about, say... getting a car alarm installed on my friend's POS that's been stolen a million times. I know a guy who can hook us up on pricing. I know another guy who will install it for me for free. I know a woman at the insurance agency who will pull all the strings she can to see if the new alarm will lower the insurance rates. Knowing people in places will bail you out of a million and one situations.
Forget favours like beer. Networking with people is important, and computer skills can do that for you.
I'm now 20 and just finished my second year of university; I work fewer than 10 hours a week and make more money than the average bachelor degree graduate from my school. I usually don't brag, but I think that's a pretty good accomplishment.
Allergies are one area where homeopathy is useful, because you're not concerned with curing the causes, you're concerned with getting rid of the symptoms. ("Yes, I know there are trees blooming outside, I just want to stop sneezing.") Modern medicine has antihistamines that can help block the symptoms, and cause some side effects, and homeopathy has bogus quack formulations that can also help block the symptoms, and have different side effects, and depending on which one does a better job for _you_ with the allergens that are blowing around right now, and which one has more annoying side effects (e.g. drowsiness vs. stomach upset), sometimes homeopathy is the right choice. Or you can get allergy shots, which aren't really much different from well-controlled homeopathy. It's only been the last couple of years that I've found that modern medicine has products that are significantly better.
Flu is a special case. It's a virus, so if the vaccine didn't protect you this year, modern medicine mostly tells you to stay home in bed, drink hot fluids, and cover your mouth when you sneeze, and otherwise can't do much. Homeopathy is good for this - there are a couple of homeopathic preparations that can take you from feeling really lousy to merely feeling not very good, and that's a big win.
The nice thing about homeopathy is that its particularl bogus theory is that the more you dilute a medicine, the more subtle the hints it gives your body's immune system about how to attack the real problem, and therefore the stronger it is. (It's similar to the theory of making martinis that says that you should take the vermouth bottle and gesture meaningfully in the direction of the glass without actually pouring any in...) So unlike herbalist medicines, which you take in non-trivial quantities and can sometimes cause liver or kidney damage if you're not careful, most homeopathic medicines aren't going to hurt you, and the "really strong" stuff is no threat at all if it doesn't work.
Chiropractic is another quack theory that is obviously not useful for curing disease, but sometimes it can help with back and neck pain, and if you think of it as yet another form of massage, it's often somewhat helpful for many people. My first chiropractor was also an MD, which rather surprised both communities. The last one I went to wasn't able to recognize that my shoulder pains were early bursitis, so it was a while before I found a doctor who could do much about it, but at least he knew his limitations and could tell me that shoulder joints weren't something he knew about.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm a member of the Valley Barter Group in Phoenix.
I am able to trade out computer services for barter bucks which I can use to get food catering, so I don't have to spend time shopping/cooking.
The added bonus of joining a barter group is that people are way more willing to spend barter bucks than cash, so you can get value out of people who wouldn't otherwise pay you. It is also good for increasing business when you don't have a lot of it already.
Security is inversely proportional to the commitment of one desiring to circumvent it.
People like people who like them. This shirt says that the world pisses me off, and you're part of that world. Therefore, i'm pissed off at idiots like you who can't tell that my time is too precious to spend fixing your broken PC.
If you're too busy to fix someone's PC just tell them so, nicely.
That's respecting yourself, AND others. (ok that sounds like an after school special but it's true).
Photos.
Thats what my girlfreind gave me for fixing her pc, does that count?
:)
Now if only her twin sister had the same problem
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?