By its essence this is not a poker story.  So keep that in mind.

I have the utmost respect for people that work with their hands.  It is something that is very hard for me to do and every time I attempt it I end up breaking something.  I have talked about this in the past but let me bring it up again, I am a big fan of buying “life hours”.  I have an assistant that works 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week.  I have someone who cuts my grass, which normally took me an hour a week.  Just right there I have something like a 27 hour day.  Trust me, it is more like 32, if you factor in business contacts I have to think I am already at 48 hours.  But I digress.  One thing I have never had is someone that can do all the stuff around my house that baffles me, well yesterday that guy showed up and he changed my life a little bit and I hope I changed his a little bit too.

Part of this story is that if you want to be good at poker you need to practice and learn, that requires time and effort.  Time and effort are tough when you are occupied with a lot of silly things that you are not good at.  Pay people to do those things, even if it just buys you vacation time or a weekly massage.

When he was done painting we looked around the house to see what else might need some fixing.  This was about the time price came up, he and my wife had agreed on a price but he decided now that we were talking about it that he did not do as much work as she originally requested.  When the subject of price came up he dropped his pants and gave me “a deal”.  I paid him $20 more an hour than the deal he gave me.  A $220 tip so to speak.  Well not really because I think he charged me too little.  I told him why I did it, the reason was simple, what made his service remarkable to me is that it allowed me to not do it.  If he was a cracker jack box, that was his free prize to me, not “the deal”.  In fact, “the deal” actually works against our future relationship.  Let’s say I have a 2 hour job, to call him up at $25 an hour or so would be just embarassing; I would not do it, but if he charged me $75 I would call him all the time.  His “deal” was actually costing him business. 

So I told him that I would make some calls on his behalf to my friends that also “buy time” and that he should charge them at a similar rate.  I do business with people I trust and I tell everyone about them, in a lot of cases because they did business with me in the past.  Socio-economically we are all similar because we are all using the same formula.

I am not sure if I changed his life or not but I sure hope I did because he is a good guy and deserves to charge more.  His services are better than the people he competes with.