Case Study of How I do what I do

Ever heard the phrase "we get satisfaction from our work time, not from our leisure time"? 

Last week was like that.

I was at the beach with my dog Felix at 9:15am on Monday morning when I received a phone call. It was from a small business owner who had found me on google.

"Are you the SQL guy?" he asked ... 

Long story short, it turns out this man owned a business in the construction industry and his system kept crashing. As a builder, he didn't know much about it, except that it runs on SQL Server. 

After this brief discussion, we scheduled a time for later that afternoon for me to remotely view the situation with one of his team who is more "IT literate". And during this call I see that that yes, the SQL database and its front end are having issues and I think I can help. 

The boss then asked me "what is your hourly rate to fix?". 

I replied by saying that I don't do hourly rates. Because that would be dumb.

The quicker I get it fixed (which is what he wanted) then the less I get paid. And the longer I take to fix it, the more I get paid, but the more he will get pissed off. It's a pretty stupid thing to do. 

So I quoted him $99 to do my SQL Integrity Check. I said that after I do this, then I would have more information about the problem and be able to offer an accurate quote to fix. 

I did this check on Wednesday afternoon and found what I suspected was the problem. I then quoted a price to fix, based on this assumption, and said that my work carries a money back guarantee so if I am wrong he doesn't pay. The risk is all mine.

So I implement my solution, and yep, the problem was fixed by Wednesday evening. 

Customer was happy in that his system was operational again, and I was happy as I was able to fix an issue. 

Rodney  

ps. There is something immensely satisfying about being on the beach at 9am on a Monday morning when most people are in the office. 

pps. Oh, and if you're wondering, the issue was that their SQL Express had hit the 10gb limit, all because the space cadet developer had decided to save images into the database. I might do another blog post on how I figured this out as it would be helpful for beginners in the "Emergency SQL DBA" space.