I do freelance IT stuff
Most of the time it means being called in at the last minute by a customer who's IT staff are way out of their depth and need someone to come in and say 'poke that bit'.

I charge a minimum of a half day fee per call out (£150), mostly to dissuade people from calling me for stupid things (and partly cos I'm lazy and like to sit in my jimjams eating doughnuts most of the day).

Anyway, if they are muppets enough to call me and get me out for something stupid who am I to really argue.

My top three recent callouts where :-

1. I need a pc setup. Took 10 minutes to plug in the PC, connect a network cable and get it online.

2. My PC wont go on the network. Visit site, plug network cable into PC. That was about 30 seconds work.

3. The server needs to be rebooted. When I told them to go ahead and reboot it, nobody was willing to do it in case it exploded.
Visited site, rebooted server. 20 minutes work.

Shame its not like that everyday.
(EvilMeister, Tue 14 Sep 2010, 13:12, 3 replies)

Even that's too much effort.
The sysadmins at my old office didn't even have to make a site visit to reboot the server: we'd just call them and they'd reboot it remotely.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Tue 14 Sep 2010, 16:01, closed)

That's fairly common.
In one of my old jobs the support was done from Bangalore on servers sat in Holland.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Tue 14 Sep 2010, 22:51, closed)

Not sure I'd care to brag about hugely overcharging some chump 150 quid to plug their PC in. OAP, by any chance?
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Wed 15 Sep 2010, 0:43, closed)