Rewards...
I once had to fly out to South Africa in the Apartheid era at very short notice on a Thursday to fix a problem with some equipment in a factory*. I was on site so long I didn't get back to the hotel till Saturday night. On Sunday morning the grateful client turned up at breakfast time, and proceeded to take me out to a country club where we spent most of Sunday. Then they offered me a job...diplomatically I explained that my family is sufficiently Indian that this would present severe problems.
I remember this trip as well because on that Sunday I got talking to someone who asked me how bad things were in England, When I expressed surprise I discovered that the South African television was giving the impression that the IRA was bombing the country rather like the Germans did in WW2. I explained that southeast England was rather a long way from Belfast, but I got the impression I wasn't believed. I guessed this was an attempt to dissuade anybody with a British passport from leaving the country, but perhaps he was just paranoid.
*It was a genuine major problem, not the time I went out to Detroit at a day's notice to, as it turned out, change a lightbulb. A bulb that you could get from Radio Shack, which is in fact where I got the replacement.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
