I don’t want your services, I just want you to show me how…

Every industry has their quirks. If you’re a DJ, you get people asking to host a party for free to get your name out there. If you’re an artist, you get commission requests for free to get “exposure”.

In the IT world, be it Cyber security, network security, or any other type of IT work, you generally get users that ask you to do stuff for them for free. Sometimes, you get the rare unicorn of a business owner who complains about his bottom line, and then asks you to provide your services to his company for free.

I was talking with a colleague of mine. He was on the phone with a business owner who did just such a thing. He was complaining about how his business was struggling to make ends meet because his clients weren’t paying their bills or didn’t pay him enough money for the services he was providing. In the very next breath he told my colleague that he didn’t want to pay for any of the services that his company was providing. He wanted to give my colleague’s company the opportunity to train him on how to “properly deploy zone based firewalls.”

Needless to say my colleague told the client that he was welcome to submit a request and he would develop a scope of work for project hours in order to provide training to this client. As of yet, if you can believe this or not, the client has not submitted said request.